A Look Back at the Evolution of Htc's Smartphone Designs

Before anything else, most people initially judge a smartphone based on its design. So, just like in real life, something appealing to the eyes tend to evoke favorable opinions about it from a cursory look. If it's terrible, or just simply cheap looking, opinions would reflect that. First impressions are without question extremely important, so that's why having a good design is the foundation that can help a phone achieve recognition right from the onset.

Through the years, HTC has been continually praised for the impressive designs that accompany its range of smartphones. Even though they've fallen back in terms of market share in the last few years, the philosophy they've established has continued to resonate. In the last decade alone, the Taiwanese company has made countless smartphones with memorable designs – more so when many of those designs hold up even now, in the face of newer competition! For this piece, we are going to take a quick look back at the evolution of HTC's smartphone designs, which seems quite relevant given that we're more than likely nearing the announcement of the company's next flagship smartphone. Having such a prestigious history in design, it's really tough to go through every single pinnacle or monumental device that radically changed their identity, so we're going to just simply skim some of the best highlights through the years.

The beginning with Windows Mobile

We all know that HTC's humble beginning began with Microsoft's Window Mobile platform, one of the dominant smartphone operating systems in contention during the 2000s. Back during the early 2000s, many of HTC's smartphone were white-labeled products, often being rebranded after the respective carriers that were selling its phones. Take the HTC Apache for example, which was rebranded as the Sprint PPC6700 over on Sprint – while Verizon received the Verizon XV6700.

The designs of these early Windows Mobile smartphones were uninspiring to say the least. Not only were they fashioned after PDA designs, accompanied with nubs for their antennas, but their silver plastic bodies seemed like a throwback to the antiquated boxy designs of PCs throughout the 1990s. Through the mid-2000s, smartphones like the HTC Wizard, Tytn, and P3600 Trinity, featured designs that followed after this practice. During an era dominated mostly by flip phones, the only reason why HTC's designs stood out from the pack was because of their brick-like sizes and large touchscreens.

Enter the touch and cleaner designs

Things really began to change with HTC's design language with the release of the HTC Touch in 2007. Who knows if Apple's unveiling of the original iPhone had anything to do with this redirection, but the HTC Touch offered a totally new design language that made consumers take notice. With the early HTC phones, you could say that they were trying to emulate the laptop design, evident in those physical keyboard and vast buttons littered throughout its phones. However, the HTC Touch simplified things with fewer buttons and going after that all-touch implementation.

On top of that, this is also when we began to see shift. Gone was the ghastly silver plastic that dominated many of HTC's early smartphones, replaced with other materials that were more inviting – like the soft touch matte finish of the HTC Touch. Not only that, but now its phones were slimmer, more compact in size. This new design language flourished throughout 2007, when subsequent phones like the HTC Touch Dual, HTC Touch Cruise, and HTC Phoebus (aka T-Mobile Shadow) all followed suit.