After months of speculation and rumors, Verizon has confirmed that the HTC One will be available for its customers “later this summer.” The announcement comes via Verizon’s official Twitter account and does no really give any more details. The exact launch date is not given, but the fact that Verizon has not slapped its Droid branding in front of the HTC one name gives us hope that Verizon will not be messing with the phones design of specifications.
We’ll be monitoring all of our usual news channels just in case more details are revealed later today. This is certainly good news for Verizon customers, but we’re still perplexed as to why Verizon and HTC chose to delay the launch of the HTC One by several months. The supply constraints may have had something to do with it, but there may be another peice to the puzzle which has not been revealed yet.
It’s coming – the HTC One will be available on the #Verizon Wireless 4G LTE network later this summer #HTCOne @HTCUSA
— Verizon News (@VerizonNews) June 3, 2013
Source: Verizon
So, here’s a question. I’m stuck with Verizon because it’s the only carrier that gets signal to my house. I want to get an HTC One without all the Verizon crap bloatware – preferably an unlocked HTC One Nexus so I get all the updates from Google.
Is this possible? Everything I’ve been able to find says that the unlocked HTC One won’t work with VZW, but all of that was written before Big Red announced they would support the HTC One. Now that they ARE offering it, is anything changed?
Rob:
You could do one of two things (from what I can gather): 1) Purchase a HTC One Developer phone direct from HTC ($650 if memory serves) OR 2) Purchase a HTC One through VZW and then unlock the bootloader and root it, the either de-bloat or load a custom ROM.
The Developer phone comes already unlocked/rooted and is also SIM unlocked, so any carrier will work. With the Verizon One, you risk HTC shutting off their HTCDev unlocking ability, but the chances are good that someone out there will undoubtedly find a way around that (they did with the Droid DNA).