HTC’s latest smartphone has given the struggling device maker a nice sales bump, driving revenue to a six-month high and bringing the company a much-needed win amid a string of losses. But the most interesting thing about HTC’s November numbers isn’t the sudden reversal, it’s the phone responsible for that reversal — the HTC One A9, which you’ll recall is a blatant copy of Apple’s latest iPhone.
It looks like Android fans really do want a clone of Apple’s iPhone.
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While HTC doesn’t share handset shipment numbers when it reports monthly figures, the Taiwan-based smartphone maker said this week that its revenue during the month of November came in at just over $314 million. HTC’s sales are still in decline — that figure is down more than 39% on-year — but it’s up 15% compared to October, and it marks HTC’s best sales performance in six months.
November of course marks the launch of HTC’s latest smartphone, the new HTC One A9. And while the phone itself is new, the design most certainly is not.
HTC has responded to copycat claims saying that Apple copied its designs long before the A9 was released, and that’s certainly accurate. Of course, the difference is plain as day: Apple’s iPhone 6 uses some design elements from earlier HTC phones, while HTC’s One A9 uses every design element from the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s. From top to bottom and front to back, it’s an iPhone.
Samsung came from out of nowhere and rose to its current position at the top of the smartphone market by copying certain aspects of Apple’s iPhone lineup, and it only had to pay a small fraction of its profits over that period of time as a penalty. Perhaps HTC will go even further by simply selling iPhones that run Android.
