Author: Brad Reed

Verizon subscribers who are looking to own one of the world’s hottest Android phones may have to wait quite a bit longer to get their hands on the HTC One. Droid Life reports that HTC public relations director Tom Harlin said during a recent Yahoo Q&A that HTC isn’t ready to make “any official announcement about HTC One coming to Verizon” while emphasizing that the “DROID DNA continues to be the HTC hero smartphone at Verizon.” The DROID DNA released late last year on Verizon and is a very strong device that still doesn’t stack up to the HTC One, which BGR found to be one of the best smartphones in the world. Every major carrier in the United States except Verizon has signed on to support the One so far and there has been some speculation that Verizon could announce support for a modified version of the device sometime this summer.

One of the big criticisms leveled at Samsung after its admittedly ridiculous Galaxy S4 launch in March was that its new device didn’t contain anything groundbreaking, only a series of “gimmicks” that consumers wouldn’t really care about, such as its  Air View feature that lets you interact with your phone just by hovering your finger over it or its Smart Pause eye-tracking technology that automatically pauses videos whenever you look away from your device. My immediate reaction was different from those of the critics, however, since I thought the new features only looked like gimmicks because Samsung’s crack marketing team hadn’t yet figured out a way to promote them.

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Windows Phone has been far from a rousing success so far, but that hasn’t stopped Microsoft from trying to goose sales of Windows Phone devices in any way it can. AllThingsD reports that Microsoft’s latest strategy involves pushing Nokia’s dirt-cheap Lumia 521 into Walmart and selling it for $150 off-contract. The goal is to undercut the appeal of subsidized devices such as the iPhone and the Galaxy S4, which both sell for $200 or more at most retail outlets if users sign two-year service contracts. But by offering the Lumia 521 through T-Mobile without a service agreement and at a comparatively low monthly rate of $70 for voice and data, Microsoft may have found a clever way to attract budget-conscious phone shoppers. The Lumia 521 features a 4-inch 800 x 480-pixel display, a dual-core 1GHz processor and a 5-megapixel rear camera.

The iPhone 5. The Galaxy S4. The HTC One. The BlackBerry Z10. These are the smartphones that we’ve been reading about obsessively for the past several months and are some of the American smartphone market’s heavyweight fighters. But while these big-name vendors have been rolling out their premier devices, Chinese smartphone vendor ZTE has been quietly flooding the U.S. market with low-cost smartphones that have now made it one of the five biggest smartphone vendors in the United States, Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Shah says.

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We’ve been hearing rumors about Apple releasing a cheaper iPhone for a while, but J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz this week has made a compelling case that a lower-cost iPhone will likely be a mid-range device that sells in the $350 range without subsidies and not in the $150 bargain-bin range with devices like the Nokia Lumia 521. Per Barron’s, Moskowitz writes that the success Apple has enjoyed with the iPad mini so far has shown the company that it can significantly expand its reach if it’s “willing to sacrifice near-term gross margins” in exchange for long-term dominance of the market. Although there aren’t too many well-known smartphones selling in the $350 range, Moskowitz notes that “Apple usually creates new demand when it steps into a price band” since “the $300-400 price range for tablets did not have much demand… before the launch of the iPad mini.”