High Tech Computer Corp (HTC, 宏達電), the world's biggest maker of handsets running on Microsoft Corp's system, said yesterday that it would supply Sprint Nextel Corp with a cellphone featuring a touch screen and high-speed CDMA transmission next month.
The sale will put HTC in direct competition with Apple Inc's touch-screen iPhone in the US.
The iPhone only enables data transmission at slower speed based on the 2.5G, or edge technology.
"The debut of Touch in North America will further strengthen HTC's deep partnership with Sprint as well as provide US consumers with stronger performing cellphones," company chief executive officer Peter Chou (周永明) said in a statement yesterday.
Sprint Nextel, the third-largest mobile carrier in the US, only offers wireless services on the CDMA2000 technology, which is an incompatible competitor of the other major 3G standard.
In June, HTC unveiled the first model of the Touch series in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, but has not yet started to sell the phone in the US.
"At the moment, we will focus on selling the 3G model in cooperation with Sprint," John Wang (
The US is a highly competitive and dynamic market and HTC wants to collaborate with its customers in offering diversified services on customer-made handsets, Wang said.
"The [sales] prospect for the Touch series should be quite fair," he said.
Since the introduction of the Touch series four months ago, HTC has sold more than 800,000 of the phones around the world, Wang said.
Beginning on Nov. 4, Sprint will sell HTC's 3G Touch at US$249.99 with a two-year subscriber agreement and a US$100 mail-in rebate.
Standard data rates will apply for music and other content downloads.
The launch of new 3G and 3.5G smartphones should help boost HTC's revenues by 15 percent to NT$33 billion (US$1 billion) in the fourth quarter from NT$29.11 billion in the third quarter, Citigroup analyst Dale Gai said.
HTC is one of the top picks that Citigroup suggests buying.
Gai raised the target price for HTC to NT$680 on Wednesday, implying that there would be around a 11 percent upside over the coming 12 months.
HTC shares closed at NT$611 yesterday in Taipei.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Starlux Airlines Co (星宇航空) today unveiled a long-haul network expansion plan at a shareholders’ meeting in Taipei, including direct flights to Barcelona, Spain, and Zurich, Switzerland, as well as a service connecting Taipei, Sydney and New Zealand. Starlux is to become the first Taiwanese carrier to offer non-stop services to the two European cities, while the inaugural oceanic route is expected to expand transit opportunities within the Australia-New Zealand market, Starlux said. Flight services to Chicago, Dallas, Washington and New York are under evaluation, the airline added. Prior to the shareholders’ meeting, the airline earlier this year announced that it would be
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Taiwanese prosecutors suspect that three people successfully smuggled at least one shipment of Nvidia Corp artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China after first exporting them to Japan, people familiar with the matter said. The trio was detained last week by the Keelung District Prosecutors’ Office for allegedly falsifying documents related to exports of Super Micro Computer Inc servers containing advanced Nvidia chips, which the US has barred from sale to China without a license from Washington. The move marked Taiwan’s first public crackdown on AI chip diversion after years of pressure from the US to take a more active role in curtailing
RSS