Mobile Phone Blog:

If you’d have asked me, a couple of years ago, who I thought were the most exciting phone maker in the world, I can tell you for a fact that I wouldn’t have said HTC. This was back in the days of the TyTN II, when Windows Mobile phones were still hulking great things, that often froze up for absolutely no reason whatsoever. However, if you asked me that question, right now, in 2009, my answer would be very different.

For one thing, my answer would be HTC…

While HTC had already started to make Windows Mobile more user-friendly with the original Diamond, my first experience of the Taiwanese manufacturer actually came though owning a Sony Ericsson phone, the X1 to be precise. A gorgeous phone, that I love to bits, and one that (despite being designed and imagined by Sony Ericsson) was actually built by HTC. And that phone brought home to me the importance of hardware in a Windows Mobile phone, since if you don’t have good hardware, the phone will run like a dog.

Suffice to say, the X1 has very good (and manufactured by HTC) hardware. At that point, I’d still have had a Sony Ericsson phone over a HTC phone, though. And then, HTC got involved with the game-changer that is Android, leading to phones like the HTC Hero, which is, by all accounts, chuffing stunning.

And then, they announced the HTC HD2, which brings us right up to the present day. Y’see, the HTC of 2009 is a vastly different beast to the HTC of two years ago. Their star is most definitely on the ascendant. Hell, they’ve even started making TV adverts like one of the big five (and a note here: I’m seriously considering including HTC and changing that definition to ‘the big six’) manufacturers, just to increase people’s brand awareness. Here you go, here’s the American version (our version is the same, but has the British Hero in place of the American one):

All this comes as a result of an article I read on Alibaba, an interview with HTC CEO, Peter Chou, where he talks about their future, and what they plan to do in the mobile space. Basically, it boils down to “work with both Microsoft and Google, push both types of phone as hard as each other, make ourselves into a tier 1 manufacturer”. They aim to be one of the big manufacturers out there.

Here’s the thing, though: in my eyes, I already see them as that. I already consider them one of the big boys. Hell, I see them as the most important and exciting manufacturer in the mobile world at the minute, and that should tell you something, considering that me, a self-proclaimed Sony junkie, is writing what is little more than an extended love note to HTC.

And besides, the HTC HD2 is the best phone I’ve ever seen. I want one. I want one so much that I’m actually favouring it over the Sony Ericsson phone I was going to get (that would be the X2). That’s why HTC are so exciting. They make phones that, in one stroke, make me not want to get the incredibly powerful phone (yes, the X2), that I’ve spent about 8 months mithering about.

If you’d told me, two years ago, that right now I’d be ignoring a Sony Ericsson phone in favour of an HTC phone, I wouldn’t have believed you. In the space of two short years, that is how far HTC have come…

Are you a HTC fan? Do you agree that they make the best touchscreen phones in the business? Leave us a comment and have your say!