Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC Corp (宏達電) will launch its new flagship smartphone, the M7, in London and New York on Feb. 19, industry sources said yesterday.
HTC sent out invitations to press events in both cities on Wednesday, but did not reveal the name of the device.
However, corporate sources confirmed that it would be the M7.
It will mark the first time HTC has simultaneously launched a new Android model in both the UK and the US, HTC chief marketing officer Benjamin Ho (何永生) said.
Industry analysts said the new arrangement symbolizes HTC’s strong determination to stage a comeback in both the US and European markets.
HTC was ranked the world’s No. 4 smartphone producer for the whole of last year, with shipments of 32.6 million units and a 4.6 percent global market share, according to International Data Corp, a US-based market research firm.
Both figures marked significant drops from its record high in 2011, when the company’s shipments reached 43.6 million units and its market share stood at 8.8 percent.
The company officially unveiled its flagship One series of handsets at a huge press conference at last year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain.
Those devices, and the design choices in them, went on to influence much of HTC’s device portfolio last year.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the