HTC's 2009 Smartphone Lineup Leaked
2008 proved to be a good year for HTC, especially at the end with the October release of the Android powered G1 smartphone. Obviously HTC wants this success to continue and it looks like their 2009 lineup that someone leaked at PPCGeeks packs a pretty big punch - if you believe it is true, that is.
With at least 16 new smartphones in this lineup it looks like HTC will be giving Apple, Blackberry, Palm et al. a run for their money in 2009. It also seems that there will be phones for Sprint, Verizon and AT&T.
It's hard to tell much just from seeing pictures. It appears that they have a Tree line (my term, not theirs) that will compete with the Blackberry Bold. This includes the Willow, Cedar and Maple, which is described as a 3G Excalibur.
Next there is the Element line which consists of full QWERTY horizontal sliders and includes the Rhodium which will be sold by VZW and the Tungsten for Sprint. There are two more sliders that aren't consistent with this nomenclature - the Jasper and the Memphis.
This brings us to the Precious Stones/Minerals line (where Jasper should be). These are candy bar style touchscreen phones that only have a few buttons on the face. This line includes the Iolite, Topaz, Citrine, Beryl (described as the Jade 2), Magnet (Iolite 2), Sapphire (1.0, 1,5 and 2.0), Firestone and Whitestone. The Whitestone has a prop on the back so you can set it up like a picture frame. Good for video calls and watching movies I guess.
Then there are a few oddballs that don't belong in any group. Moving from Greek to Egyptian mythology there is the Thoth (described as the Athena 2). It looks like a candy bar but also has a full QWERTY that is hard to tell where it comes from - must be a slider. There is a grotesquely pink Android powered Hero which just looks like a G1(pink denotes female so shouldn't it be Heroin? Guess the 'HTC Heroin' could turn into a marketing SNAFU). Finally there is the Twin which is a CDMA and GSM phone.
I find it hard to believe that all of these phones will be released this year. Some of them are probably concepts. The 2009 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is fast approaching (Feb. 16 - 19) so if there is truth to this lineup we should probably hear some announcements from HTC about at least a few of these phones. It will be interesting to see how many run on Android. You can see the rest of the lineup at PPCGeeks.
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