Taiwanese mobile phone manufacturer HTC has released some great products since buying a $300 million stake in Beats Audio, such as the Sensation XE, but now we’re hearing they have many more products planned with Beats integration, including a music streaming service.
Tech news site Gigaom reports that the company is working on a new tablet, several new smartphones and even a music streaming service, quoting sources that are “familiar with the company’s plans”. New smartphones and tablets are to be expected from HTC, but a music streaming service – now that’s something of a surprise to us.
Gigaom’s sources say that HTC is working with legendary music producer and co-founder of Beats Audio, Jimmy Iovine, to develop a new music streaming service which will be pre-loaded onto HTC’s smartphones and tablet devices in the future. Creating an app to work smoothly on Android gadgets will be HTC’s area of expertise, whereas Jimmy Iovine’s position in the music industry will help get content onto the service through signing deals with music labels.
HTC is said to still be working on the finer details of the service, such as pricing. If the software is to be loaded onto HTC devices as the primary music player, we can’t see HTC wanting to charge a great deal of money to customers who have already paid out for a device. The software may be launched on PC and Mac and use a pay model like Spotify, which would make more sense.
Interestingly, the same publication says that HTC is working on a new ‘boombox’ product that will connect to HTC phones and tablets via Bluetooth and stream music. Beats Audio already has a boombox device with iPod docking on the market at a cool £350, which we’re hoping will have influences on HTC’s speaker system.
In a final word from the tipster, he or she claims that HTC ‘could’ unveil the music streaming service later this month at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. They do seem pretty certain, however, that the company will launch “a number of new products including a tablet”.
We know that HTC has some new Quad-Core phones up its sleeve – such as the Edge – but we’ve heard very little of a new tablet. Perhaps HTC will be officially announcing the Jetstream tablet, sans-4G connectivity, for the UK market.
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Source: Gigaom