Dear HTC, please find enclosed your 2012 report card.

The best phone ever made. EVAR.

HTC.

HTC!

Where do I start? Perhaps I shall start by saying I love you. Seriously, I love you. Sadly, these days I am starting to love you in the way that I love cassette tapes; for what you once were to me, not what you represent now.

If that sounds painful HTC, please remember, the truth only hurts if it ought to.

Perhaps that was a little acerbic for a beginning? Allow me take one step back, and lay down some context.


My first HTC handset was the venerable HTC Touch Pro (Raphael). At the time I was just too tired of QVGA to contemplate more Nokia handsets, despite how much I had loved them until then (for you young 'uns, QVGA is 240x320 - yes, the horror, the HORROR!). I needed a higher resolution. Enter the Touch Pro, with it's geekalicious slide out QWERTY, and unheard of VGA resolution. I was in love. I quickly climbed the Windows Mobile learning curve, taking the Touch Pro from merely OK to somewhere between usable and even good. Shortly afterwards I got the first retina-display phone in history, the Xperia X1. To this date, both remain amongst my favourite phones ever. Fast forward through a brief return to Symbian in the Samsung i8910, and I came back to the Windows Mobile fold.

...and what a return it was: the HTC HD2. My enduring favourite handset. Take a moment, let that sink in. My favourite. My favourite when I've owned the Nokia N95, N95 8GB, N82, 5800, HTC Touch Pro, Sony Xperia X1, N97, Samsung i8910, N900, HTC Desire, Galaxy S, Sony  Xperia X10, Galaxy SII, HTC Sensation, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Nexus, HTC One X, Galaxy S3, Nokia N8, Nokia N9, iPhone 4s, Nokia Pureview 808, Galaxy Note 2, Huawei Ascend D1 Quad XL, Nexus 4, and, just now, the HTC Butterfly. That's a whole lot of phone, but you were the top of the heap HTC.

Suffice to say, while I'm nobodies blind fanboi, Nokia and HTC are about as close as I get to that moniker. There is a brand nostalgia there that nobody will ever get close to, I suspect. That makes me potentially your strongest ally when you get things right, or your worst enemy when you don't.

In 2012 you got some stuff right, nobody will deny you that HTC, least of all me. You started to strip away some of the bloat in Sense. You started to make a genuine effort with photography. You really invested in screen technology. You improved on your (already good) design philosophy. I wanted  to love the One X when I got it. I really, really did. It's just, well, I couldn't.

But, before we get into that, lets recap what you did do well:

• You produced the best screen of 2012. Hands-down. I've seen them all, and the One X SLCD2 panel reigns supreme.
• You made some impeccably designed products, aesthetically, like the One X.
• You trimmed some of the fat from Sense.
• You (finally!) started getting serious about mobile photography.
• You divested a little from some services, that were merely a distraction really, and couldn't go toe-to-toe with competing apps.

It begs the question, so what went so horribly wrong? Right?! What can you do about it?

• Trim more from Sense, make it lean and performing. From what I've seen of Sense 5 the cleaner iconography bodes well, but it needs to go further than that. Much further. It needs to dazzle. Not just with being instantaneously and immediately responsive, but with being intuitive and user-friendly. No more customised settings menus where the items users most want are buried beneath those they rarely use, no more flashy but functionally deficient variations on stock Android like your horrible Sense UI Recent Apps menu.
• Get your design priorities right. Honestly, I'm sitting here with an HTC Butterfly just horrified at some of the basics that are done heinously wrong. Aesthetics have taken too much of a lead; function, nay, important function, has taken a back seat. The physical buttons are awful. They are designed to look pretty, with brushed-metal textures and profiles that are nigh-on flush with the device edges. Pretty, but there is NO tactile feedback. Button placement is poor. Seriously, the power button is top and centre on the device? Look to Apple HTC, look to Apple. Possibly no other manufacturer is as driven by aesthetics as Apple, and yet their physical buttons stand proud with oodles of tactile feedback. They might have been the first to eschew physical buttons, but they recognise how vital they are if you are going to use them.
• Make sure there is micro SD expansion. This was a great disappointment in the One X, and a great thing to see back in the HTC Butterfly. It's a way that Android has differentiated itself from others in the past, and still something important to your user-base. While you're at it, make sure exFAT and NTFS formatted cards work too, OK?
• Keep going with USB OTG support! I'm still a bit mystified as to why you neglected to include this *native to Android* functionality from the One X. It doesn't require more hardware, only software support. Why wouldn't you include it?! I'm extremely happy to see OTG support in my HTC Butterfly, especially the support for standard USB audio, but it needs to go further - where is the gamepad support for example?
• Improve your imaging capabilities. It might seem odd to mention this here, considering I mentioned imaging as one of your improved areas in 2012, but you still have a long ways to go here. While I really liked the F/2.4 aperture in the One X, and the considerable software-side improvements you made - like still capture in-video and burst modes, the image quality still wasn't there. HTC camera shots remain marred by excessive noise and poor dynamic range - noise so excessive that it utterly destroys resolved detail, more than negating positives like superior apertures Vs most of the competitions 2012 handsets. 
• Embrace the developer community. They have long been your most voracious supporters. Reverse your terrible bootloader policy. Stop sending take-down notices to sites who host important content for your users.
• Keep ahead of the curve. Once upon a time you pushed the envelope, hardware-wise, rather than just "being there". Being first to 1080p in the DNA and Butterly suggests a move towards leading the hardware front again - keep at it!
• ...and, number one: SORT OUT YOUR BATTERIES. Please. PLEASE! Note that I am not even calling for removable batteries, as much as I would indeed prefer that. I can see that you value sleekness above battery capacity, and, rightly or wrongly, I'm not asking you to do an about face on your judgement there. That said, the battery life on your handsets is poor. You seem slow to realise that consumers really care about this: all the whizz-bang features in the world do not make up for a device that dies too soon. My Butterfly got about 2 hours of screen-on time today, all non-intensive use I might add, and a further 10 hours on standby before it hit 15% battery remaining. That is, to be perfectly blunt, pathetic. My Note 2 in the same use would have like 80% or so remaining. Heck, even my S3 would have at least 50% remaining. It's not good enough. Not even close. 

HTC, the honest truth is that you are, in many ways, closer to achieving perfection than anyone else. A few realignments here and there and you would be THE manufacturer to beat in 2013. I know you've said that advertising is where you fell down in 2012, but you need to wake up to yourself: TAKE THE RED PILL. It wasn't advertising that let you down. It was your products. Products that were demonstrably inferior in too many ways to offerings from your competitors. Products that demonstrated (and still do, if the Butterfly is anything to go by) a fundamental disconnect with the market. Wake up to that and do better, or fall.

It's up to you HTC.

It's all on you.

For myself, I hope you do better. I hope you bring a spiritual successor to the HD2 to my eager hands. I can't help thinking that you won't though, that you'll be in the same place a year from now, misattributing your failures to some other scapegoat. I've seen it before, after all... I saw what happened to Nokia, who I once revered...