HTC

When we advised HTC to start fighting dirty a while ago, we didn’t expect them to take us quite so literally. In a new ad for its flagship HTC One smartphone, HTC shows off its new Blink Feed interface that the company bills as a single live stream that’s constantly showing the latest updates on all your apps, thus making it easier for you to find new data without switching through all your apps individually. In the new ad, HTC shows users of rival devices “digging” on their phones for all their apps as piles of dirt start to appear around their feet. HTC One owners, on the other hand, have a much cleaner experience and are shown getting everything they need through Blink Feed. The full advertisement is posted below. More →

Verizon subscribers who are looking to own one of the world’s hottest Android phones may have to wait quite a bit longer to get their hands on the HTC One. Droid Life reports that HTC public relations director Tom Harlin said during a recent Yahoo Q&A that HTC isn’t ready to make “any official announcement about HTC One coming to Verizon” while emphasizing that the “DROID DNA continues to be the HTC hero smartphone at Verizon.” The DROID DNA released late last year on Verizon and is a very strong device that still doesn’t stack up to the HTC One, which BGR found to be one of the best smartphones in the world. Every major carrier in the United States except Verizon has signed on to support the One so far and there has been some speculation that Verizon could announce support for a modified version of the device sometime this summer.

The biggest question for the HTC One hasn’t been whether it’s good enough to go toe-to-toe with Samsung’s Galaxy S4, but whether it can survive under fire from Samsung’s marketing Death Star that spent a whopping $402 million in the United States alone last year. Barron’s points us to a new research note from CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets analyst CK Cheng, who has upped his sales estimates for the HTC’s new flagship phone to 3.5 million units in the second quarter of 2013, up from an earlier estimate of between 2.5 million to 3 million. For the full year, Cheng says that HTC will probably sell between 9 million and 10 million HTC Ones, which is an improvement from sales of the HTC One X that topped out at between 7 million and 8 million units. Cheng also says that the glowing reviews the HTC One has received will keep its sales strong throughout the year even as Samsung is shipping upward of 60 million Galaxy S4 models to markets around the world.