Hacker News Reader

Comment by sampa | Hacker News Reader

I miss HTC (yeah, they're not dead officially, yet). From making ODM PDAs/phones for Dell/Compaq/HP/Google to becoming one of the top smartphone makers and playing with VR/beats headphones and into oblivion.

Hope somebody writes a book about them.

View on HN

To this day, the G1/HTC Dream is my favorite phone I've ever had. Each phone since then has been more or less a utilitarian upgrade, but that one was just fun. I loved popping out the slide out keyboard with that satisfying click.

(It could have also been a reflection of where I was in life. I was firmly in my fun years, moved cities twice, and met my wife with that phone. I wonder if there are going to be people in the future similarly nostalgic for, I don't know, the Samsung Galaxy A9 because it's what they took to college.)

I had a HTC Desire Z, and I believe there were a few more models with a full QWERTY keyboard after that. I found it pretty hard to type on (I had a Nokia E61 before which somehow seemed easier), yet more than once when on call I SSHed into production to resolve issues directly from the phone :D

Part of the issue then was touchscreens were still pretty bad in terms of accuracy and sensitivity, and screens were small, so if you wanted to type something fast you needed a physical keyboard. Today I feel like I could do the same with any 6" phone with the on-screen keyboard.

I, too, had the G1 from about the time it came out. It was a pretty cool phone.

For me, my all-time favorite was the Danger Hiptop II/SideKick II. No phone since then has ever been so much fun.

For a while there, HTC was starting to look like the house brand for Windows Mobile/Pocket PC phones (I'm talking pre-WinMo6.x days). In the mid-00's, if you wanted a Windows phone in the U. S., you bought a Cingular/HTC 8125 with the sweet sliding keyboard. Then I bought an iPhone, quit paying attention to HTC, and later realized they're about gone. WTF happened to you, HTC?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com