The company HTC has been around since the late 1990s, producing devices and handsets for many companies, although you might not have been aware you were using their products as they didn’t carry the HTC name. Instead, those devices carried names such as iPaq under first Compaq, and then Hewlett-Packard when the companies merged.
HTC has been synonymous with the PDA and mobile phone market for all those years. Many may have used their smartphones on the Orange network under the rebranded SPV handset range, or Xda with O2 all throughout the last decade.
In 2007, they stood up on their own two feet and came out from under the shadows of their OEM clients, to produce the first HTC Touch handset that beat Apple’s iPhone to market for some time in the UK.
Since then they have gradually grown to the market presence they now have and with a distinctive quality of devices, with their latest flagship HTC Desire being a testament to that very fact.
These days, many associate HTC with the Google Android OS for mobile phones, where they produced the first handset running the platform in 2008 with the HTC Dream or T-Mobile G1. To date, HTC has produced a dozen different Android models worldwide and the majority of them in use today.
Their origins can be traced back to Microsoft Windows Mobile run devices, with the iPaq’s and SPV handsets all running versions of that very operating system. HTC has had a lot of ‘firsts’ in its history from the first colour screen palm sized PC in 1999 to more recently, the first 4G Android phone in the USA with the HTC Evo.
Windows Mobile has featured heavily in their success along with their OEM partnerships. This was first seen with the original colour screen palm sized PC running the Microsoft Palm-size PC 1.2 Color OS, on a device for Compaq known as the Aero 2100 that launched January of 1999.
Their partnership with Compaq and subsequently HP went on from there to the first PDA running the Microsoft Pocket OS in 2000, with the Compaq iPAQ H3630 and then progressing to the first Microsoft Wireless Pocket PC device with the Hewlett-Packard iPAQ H1910, only two years later.
From then on a number of the HTC phones were found in the UK under the Orange SPV series or the O2 Xda range, with the first Microsoft powered Smartphones arriving as the initial O2 Xda and Orange SPV models. Some notable milestones within those rebranded handsets came from the first 2.8-inch LCD screen model with the O2 XDA II mini and Orange SPV M500. Then came along the very first 3G Microsoft Windows 5.0 phone, with the Qwerty keyboard based Orange SPV M5000 and O2 XDA Exec.
HTC has also made phones for other well-known companies such as the Treo 750 for Palm in 2006, where HTC produced a few handsets for them around that time. More recently, HTC made the Xperia X1 for Sony Ericsson although that partnership bore little more fruit after that phone.
2007 saw the first phone of theirs under the HTC name with the HTC Touch, a full touch screen handset running Windows Mobile 6 and their own TouchFlo overlay on top of that OS. Since then HTC haven’t looked back and have gone on to produce a veritable range of touch screen devices running Windows and Android, all to suit many markets from budget to the more ‘flagship’ expensive handsets.
