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Struggling mobile manufacturer HTC has been hit by a wave of resignations as many senior managers have recently jumped ship. HTC has really been having a tough time over the last year or so but this latest setback will be really hard to bear. While we loved their breathtaking skydiving advert featuring Roberta Mancino, this news means that allusions to the Titanic are only just in the realm of hyperbole rather than realism.

The most recent departure is HTC’s Chief Product Officer, Kouji Kodera. He has been in charge of their recent strategy change toward a concentration on a smaller range of uniquely designed and recognisable models such as the award-winning HTC One. The hilariously-coiffed Kodera has had a huge say in defining the company’s design choices as well as its move to drastically-shrink its portfolio of Android smartphones. Worringly for HTC, Kodera is a big name to be losing at this point in time.

It’s not just their Chief Product Officer – several high-profile employees have left HTC during 2013. From the European side of things, UK chief Phil Roberson left back in march after less than nine months. He brought with him plenty of mobile expertise having previously been a director at Everything Everywhere.

Phil Roberson was soon followed by Mike Coombes who was HTC’s Head of Sales in the UK. He had been at HTC for even less time and as he worked closely with Everything Everywhere in his previous rôle at Nokia, there’s obviously much speculation that their departures were linked.

This is especially true as James Atkins, the ex-Head of Marketing, also left about the same time. Clearly it’s a big blow to lose so many senior staff from the UK side of the operation in such quick succession.

And it really does seem like everyone is leaving at the same time aware that they are on a sinking ship. HTC’s VP of Global Communications Jason Gordon has also quit recently. As has HTC’s Director of Digital Marketing – John Starkweather – who has moved to US mobile company AT&T. Yet another high profile departure is Global Retail Marketing Manager Rebecca Rowland who now works for Microsoft. It seems that a lot of people working at HTC have been freshening up their CVs and putting out feelers elsewhere recently.

It’s not unreasonable to say that HTC looks like it’s in full-on self-destruct mode right now.

They even lost product strategy manager Eric Lin not so long ago. HTC execs will be particularly furious about this as Eric Lin went to the unprecedented step of actively denouncing the company as he encouraged his colleagues to quite on Twitter:

To all my friends still at @HTC – just quit. leave now. it’s tough to do, but you’ll be so much happier, I swear.

— eric L (@ericlin) May 20, 2013

Staggeringly unprofessional maybe, but the message is loud and clear: HTC is dying. The grass really is green over here on the other side.

HTC has certainly been struggling recent with sales and profit figures pretty much in freefall compared to their rivals. They were once the darlings of Android with some of the best results to show and some really stunning handsets backed the the gorgeous custom-built Sense UI.

However, Samsung is running away with the majority of smartphone shipments these days and the launch of their new First handset was pretty much a failure. To be fair this was due to some backstabbing from Facebook robbing HTC of an exclusive app, but there’s no denying that the phone’s release has been a bit of a shambles and there have been rapid price-cuts in the US.

There’s even been questioning of HTC’s reining CEO, Peter Chou. It seems both investors and employees are losing faith in his captaincy of the Taiwanese company. Despite the recent financial problems, the organisation hasn’t exactly been helping itself when it ran into supply issues following the release of its flagship HTC One handset. HTC have produced some truly beautiful phones and software over the years but only time will tell how much longer the skipper hangs on during the buffeting from this storm.

What do you make of this? Is HTC’s time up or will it weather the rough waves and make it through this? Will we see more senior staff leaving or maybe even Peter Chou being made to walk the plank? And how do you rate HTC’s phones compared to the competition? Give us your thoughts 🙂

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Giffgaff has just released its terrifying new YouTube video. Borrowing heavily from Romero’s Living Dead B-movies as well Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and the rib-tickling Shaun of the Dead, the bloodcurdling short has a serious point to make: changing mobile provider need not be scary.

After crowd-sourcing gore-covered actors from their active user forums, Giffgaff wanted to make the point that everything is easier when people work together. And that’s why they have some of the highest customer satisfaction ratings going as well as rock-bottom rates. While Giffgaff might do things a little differently from the mainstream operators, it does mean that they can offer what’s arguably a superior service.

The spine-tingling advert has been a long time in the planning and has been hyped up quite a lot. It also has very high production values as well as a cheeky sense of humour much like their last notable offering that featured Orville the Duck. The new advert is being promoted with the #dontbescared hashtag and was premièred tonight on Channel 4 and E4. Have you watched it? What do you make of it?

Giffgaff has much cheaper prices that other networks and offers some great monthly deals too. For a free Giffgaff SIM card which gives you £5 free credit to get started with, click here and don’t forget to read our simple guide to switching mobile network.

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One of Google’s big announcements at the recent Google I/O developer conference in San Franciso was the updated instant message app now called Google Hangouts. Announced on the first day of the conference, the new version that replaces Google Chat and Google Talk is set to revolutionise instant messaging on smartphones.

We’ve been testing the app for the last week and have been very impressed. It’s certainly a massive improvement on the previous Google Talk app on Android and certainly vastly betters all the alternatives now such as iMessage and WhatsApp or even Kik, Trillian and GroupMe.

What are the updates?

First of all, let’s talk about what’s new compared to the previous version of Google Talk. Google markets the new app as “bringing your conversations to life”. It might not quite live up to that hyperbole, but the user interaction is certainly a lot smoothly and the communication with your friends and realistic is definitely much more vivid and intimate.

There are two main ways to hang out with your contacts – via text chats and video chats. We’re tried both out but suspect most mobile phone users will be using text chats for much of the time. As far as the technical aspects go, there’s currently a limit of 100 contacts in each text chat and 10 people in each video chat – these are sufficiently high that we doubt users will ever encounter these restrictions.

One of the key things about the new Google Hangouts is that it’s truly multi-platform. It’s available on iOS as well as Android and also links into the desktop experience as long as you have a Google account. Setting it up on Android is as simple as updating your existing Google Talk app through the Play Store and on Gmail all you need to do is click on your user icon in the Chats sidebar and enable the new Google Hangouts.

Using Hangouts

In all the things we’ve tried and tested Hangouts looks great and is incredibly smooth. In fact the new animations are a joy to behold. New messages pop in and your replies effortlessly slide into place. It’s a butter-smooth user experience. You even get great long-awaited features like notifications that your chat partners are currently typing.

The video chat is great too. Smartphone users have the choice of whether to broadcast the front camera on their phone or the higher quality back camera. And video resolution is great regardless of whether there are only two people in the chat or five. We even tested it and found it to work perfectly over a weak 3G connection. This could easily replace Skype overnight.

Perhaps the only criticism of the new app is the lack of user statuses. Previously you could set yourself manually as Away, Busy or even Invisible. If you choose to use hangouts, these options are no longer available. You’re either online or not. It seems that clients will still mark you as away when you’re not actively using Hangouts but there’s no longer the privacy option to appear as away to all your contacts. Hopefully Google will reintroduce this feature soon.

Fun stuff

If you don’t think you’re quite having enough fun chilling with your mates in Hangouts, Google have included some extra Easter Eggs to liven things up. For example, you can type in things IRC-style such as /me go makes a cup of tea to perform actions. There are other keywords such as /pitchforks, /shydino and /bikeshed which also cause cool little graphics which you’ll have to try out for yourself to see what they do. Our favourite is the classic cheatcode that can be typed in on the keyboard with ↑↑↓↓←→←→AB[enter] to give your a beautiful new tree-filled background to your chat window.

Our opinion

We have to admit to being incredibly impressed by Hangouts after a first look. Everything works as it should and, best of all, it looks and feels very smart. Of course there are criticisms and many minor improvements we’d like to see Google make over the coming months. However, truthfully, there aren’t any IM apps that are as well-featured or that we’d rather use at the moment.

It’s certainly a shame that you are often pressganged into joining Google+. And it would be nice to have some more privacy options. However, this is a cross-platform panacea for those wanting to keep in touch with their close ones. We’re delighted by an attempt to unify the fragmented IM scene on mobile. And it’s great for us data-hoarders that everything you say is (optionally) recorded in perpetuity in your Gmail account. Would be nice to have video chats archived too although we wouldn’t be surprised if this is coming soon.

Another negative point is the fact that XMPP server-to-server communications has been cut out so that Jabber and other services ahave been excised. But client-to-server options are still available so that Pidgin (for example) can still integrate with it. One more missing option is plain voice calls rather than video calls. As this was support by Google Chat through Gmail previously, we can only assume this option is coming soon.

Conclusion

Overall, this is a very positive update to Google’s IM solutions and, while the excessive integration with other Google products and missing launch features is a minor bugbear, we’re confident in proclaiming it the best chat client current available on mobile. Probably on desktop too.

Google has kept things simple and easy. Real world usage between real people is much more pleasant and effortless using this new app. We can say that for sure. It’ also very stable, at least on Android. Google has carved out an impressive advantage over its competitors with this release. We’re just desperate to finally get Google Voice as well here in the UK.

For an introduction to using Hangouts, there’s a fantastic guide over here.

Have you tried Hangouts yet on your smartphone? What do you think about the new app? What are your favourite features and biggest omissions? And do you think any thing can rival it for instant messaging or free video calls? Let us know!

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