Marketing strategy is one thing, it's the marketing budget that really makes the difference.

Obviously HTC can't match such grandiose marketing of Sammy's, due to its scale.


Well, maybe HTC can't produce them enough at the moment. Mine is just 2 weeks from the factory, if that does mean anything.


Maybe it's the "HTC TWO X+".

This post has been edited by EatMe: Jun 4 2013, 12:26 PM

I forgot to put /s there.

That's most probable. Even Maxis got special promo like free Samsung phones for Maxis One Clubbers last time, even for some cheaper plans. OTOH, iPhones only got discounts.

Add that to the Sammy's all year long releases of new phones, with Maxis promotes the hell out of those.

No LTE-only option at the moment, since in earlier stage of deployment, calls are still handled on 3G/2G fallback anyway although data is on LTE.

It's the same even for the most part of the planet. Voice will only handled on LTE if the whole infrastructure is upgraded to handle Voice over LTE (VoLTE). Since that's the case, enabling LTE-only will make networks that rely on CSFB to lose voice connectivity.

That, and the LTE itself is still not mature enough to supersede others ATM.

This post has been edited by EatMe: Jun 13 2013, 10:15 PM

It's not that simple. LTE is not just about the chip. People delving into that matter should know the different kind of amplification it requires for each, and increased amount of antennas required to accomodate the signalling on different frequencies (bands).

LTE shouldn't be seen as solely one chip to put there and "tadaa, there's LTE for ya!". Even iFixit is merely guessing about the antenna placement, without any way for them to distinguish which one's which (mind you, NFC, BT and WiFi requires different antennas too).

To put it into perspective, it's more akin to having both Astro dish and terrestrial UHF antenna connected to your TV to receive broadcast from differing bands. What HTC does for certain market such as China is by eliminating the other one so it can accomodate more space.

This post has been edited by EatMe: Jun 13 2013, 10:43 PM

I don't have any specific details regarding Celcom's LTE implementation. It's just that for most LTE deployment in its earlier phase, it's common sense for most telco to rely on CSFB as stopgap measure, since migrating the whole voice stacks on the backend to VoLTE takes very long time. Even in US, i recalled that there's only 1 telco that provides VoLTE at the moment. And that one telco is not even from their Big 3.

And even if VoLTE is already deployed, the standard outlined by 3GPP still requires them to not doing it LTE-exclusive, it still requires SRVCC. Here's some interesting read.

Either way, the implementation on radio selection on the phone will be pretty much the same like it's being done today. There will be no "LTE-only" option on the default menu, for the foreseeable future at the very least.