Apple recently came out with the latest installment in its flagship lineup of smartphones, the iPhone 5S. Among the new features like a biometric fingerprint scanner is a new color option that has been making waves in the smartphone community. Samsung has been coming out with gold models of its smartphones as well. Now HTC is throwing its hat into the gold trend, although in a slightly different way.
HTC will only plate real gold on five of its HTC One handsets as a promotional exercise for the forthcoming Mobo awards. One will go to the winner of the best newcomer award at the Mobos. There's no word yet on what will happen to the other four but the Register speculates that people can expect to see some senior HTC executives flashing a gold-plated HTC One smartphone to make some people with the "champagne" colored iPhone 5S jealous.
For a while it was very fashionable to have a smartphone with a bit of bling. The Motorola Diamond was a variant of the RAZR but with sparkles on it that retailed at about $5,000 in 2005.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the gold color won't be the only way that HTC tries to keep up with Apple's Joneses. The upcoming HTC One Max is expected to come with a larger screen and a fingerprint sensor like the one that Apple touted as the biggest feature on its latest iPhone installment, the 5S.
The HTC One Max is set to be unveiled on Oct. 15. This means that both Android and iOS loyalist will have a smartphone variant option with a biometric fingerprint sensor.
"The applications for fingerprint sensors are still pretty narrow," HSBC technology analyst Jenny Lai said. "To do something like wireless payments, it requires a whole system to be built up, not just the hardware. There are basically two companies that could possibly do this kind of integration: Apple and Google."
