HTC has been very open to a variety of mobile operating systems over the years. HTC hardware has run multiple flavors of Windows operating systems, a light-weight OS called Brew MP, and has had the most success with Google’s mobile OS, Android. These days users can typically pick up a nice new phone running either Android or Windows Phone, but that does not exclude the possibility of exploring alternate options. Shortly after the HP Touchpad fire sale craze, HP announced it would consider licensing its mobile OS as it planned to exit the making of mobile hardware, but might support licensing if there was a demand for it.
At that time, some attention was aimed at HTC with folks wondering if HTC would purchase WebOS and use it as a proprietary OS to give HTC a unique niche that other smart devices were not going to have moving forward. Fast forward a little over a year and you have RIM with one foot out the door, but in somewhat the same place HP was with a successful software infrastructure in hardware troubles. Graham Wheeler, head of HTC’s Product Management for EMEA said in a recent interview that HTC is open to evaluating other mobile operating systems to see if they would make a fit in HTC’s world-class hardware.
Graham Wheeler says, I don’t have any knowledge but that is not to say we are not looking at it. But from my point of view we are not saying we are closed to a new operating system. We will review each one to make sure it’s the best for our customers.
A partnership with RIM would be unexpected considering the recent $35 million dollar acquisition of Magnet Solutions, a company focused on managing social, cloud and mobile services in the enterprise environment. With this investment it is clear that HTC has their own plans to get into the enterprise and why make such a large investment only to dive into a company that already has these service integrated.
HTC is getting ready to announce several new handsets next week and while we are sure none of them will be running Blackberry’s OS we hope sales will see the boost HTC needs to get through quarter and upcoming holiday season whether it is with Android or Windows Phone 8. With the announcement of the next generation of the iPhone now official, we do not expect to see any record-breaking sales with the upcoming HTC phones, but we do hope to see customers jumping on board with Windows Phone as it shows how much it has matured and expands into a larger ecosystem of mobile technology.
Source: MobileToday via Mashable
