By Stephen Schenck | April 20, 2012 3:13 PM
HTC’s been giving a lot of insight into its decision-making processes lately, sharing information both about its design goals for focusing on thin handsets and its moving away form QWERTY hardware keyboards recently. Now HTC is talking phone colors, and why it releases models in the shades it does.
Apparently carrier preference plays a larger role in deciding what color phones get produced than you might think. Even relatively unobjectionable colors like blue are avoided in some markets because other carriers would view it as an “AT&T phone”.
HTC also mentioned the rise of white phones that we’ve seen in recent years. For HTC, at least, white phones have been a way to attract female customers, which it sees as being less interested in the standard black or gray models traditionally available.
A lot of this sounds like common sense, but it’s interesting to hear discussed in the context of smartphones. Just like cars, people see neutral tones as “professional”, and overly colorful models as being something only a young user would want. That’s not to say there isn’t a market for bold colors, and HTC plans to keep experimenting with new options when possible to see what we respond to.
