HTC’s massive 4.7 inch Windows Phone, better known as the Titan, went on sale in the United States on November 20, 2011; AT&T offered it for $200 with a two year contract. Today, less than three months later, AT&T is selling the exact same device for just $0.01 with the same two year contract. What the hell is going on? We think that AT&T is trying to sell as many Titans as they can before they launch the all new Titan II. The second generation Titan was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and for all intents and purposes it’s the exact same phone as the first generation Titan, except that it has a 16 megapixel camera and 4G LTE. We don’t know when it’s going to be announced or how much it’s going to cost, but rumors on the internets suggest we’re going to find out in less than two weeks.
This brings up an important question, how fast is too fast? We’re all for technology improvements, but the clip at which innovation is occurring is simply unsustainable. Some of you will groan at us for bringing up Apple, but they release a new model roughly every 12 months. HTC’s Titan II comes one quarter after the original, and it’s going to compete against the HTC One X. Both devices have a 4.7 inch screen, but the One X pushes 1280 x 720 pixels, it’ll also have a dual core Qualcomm S4 processor instead the old and busted single core Qualcomm S3 chip that’s been powering Windows Phones since the platform was launched in November 2010.
Some folks will want Android, some folks will want Windows Phone, we get that. To those of you who do want a Windows Phone, we can’t help but mention that Windows Phone 8 is just half a year away, and there’s a strong chance that today’s Windows Phone aren’t even going to be upgradeable to Windows Phone 8, so … buyer beware.