A brain drain began with the departure of Scott Croyle, followed by a cavalcade of executives and eventually Peter Chou himself. Either way, somewhere in the interim between those two years HTC peaked, and from there the inevitable decline began. You can debate whether HTC truly peaked with the M7 in 2013, or the successor, the M8, in 2014. And the UI that actually managed to surpass stock Android in terms of smoothness, responsiveness and aesthetics became stale as an increasingly cash-strapped HTC was reluctant to pour money into its software experience.
BoomSound was sacrificed in the name of ever-smaller screen borders. Beats was sold off at a loss the following year. The 2013 HTC One introduced so many innovative features that HTC ultimately failed to capitalize on. HTC's Gallery would also gift you video highlights, a feature that eventually made it to Google Photos and the iPhone. Thanks to its unique sensor and computational horsepower, the M7 was able to shoot a bunch of frames both before and after the main photo in any capture, letting you scroll back through time to restore missed moments. Phone nerds loved to complain about BlinkFeed's persistent presence, but its combination of news, social and app updates was fairly groundbreaking. HTC's Sense 5 software also brought in BlinkFeed - controversial to begin with, but now a clear predecessor to the Google Feed, as well as iOS's Today View. The relative pixel sizes of the M7's camera broadly line up with what we're seeing from late 2019 and early 2020 cameras, though with far weaker processing. The Ultrapixel camera took fairly low-res 4MP photos, but with unmatched low-light fidelity for 2013. The M7 was also one of those phones that saw HTC debuting groundbreaking technologies which, with hindsight, seem far ahead of their time. The efforts of Samsung, a far bigger company by comparison, looked sloppy and childish. While both Samsung and HTC, the two Android giants of the time, plowed ahead with high technology, only HTC was able to focus the power of it through the lens of excellent hardware and software design. When I saw the Samsung Galaxy S4 for the first time a few weeks later, it was obvious HTC had won.
Source: Android Central (Image credit: Source: Android Central)
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