"HTC might be big and growing fast, but I don not a give a damn pushing this case further trying to get a solution for thousands of consumers. When profit, profit and only profit remains. Taiwanese companies will certainly loose [sic] their battle in a [sic] near future against their upcoming Chinese rivals. I am sure you know what I mean.

�

"Service support to consumers was never a great virtue of some Taiwanese companies as it might result in loosing [sic] face once they have to admit they could have done much better."

While we need to wait for more evidence, this is a bit troubling. Seems nearly every Taiwan hotshot company lets us down, usually for corruption. In this case, no one's saying anything's amiss at HTC in general, but some folks [via HTCClassAction.org] are ticked off about the company's device drivers delivering underwhelming performance:

"The latest SmartPhone and PocketPC devices from HTC (High Tech Computing) are supposed to be the most powerful devices on the market. And in theory, they are indeed real powerhouses of mobile technology. There's a catch though: HTC has neglected to include the necessary drivers needed for the devices to come to their full potential.

"This means our really expensive HTC phones (the TyTN II is about $700) are grossly underperforming. In fact, in many things, these devices operate even slower than HTC's (and competitors') two years older models--see the videos under navigation for demonstrations, especially the TomTom video (TyTN II vs Magician) is a terrific example."

Of course, this could just be one (or many) people getting pissy with too much time on their hands. Conversely, there could be real issues afoot. Personally, I'd have to be really infuriated to do something such as consider legal action.

Anyway, this, of course, may be a whole lot of nothing and we don't want to jump to conclusions. Possibly these are isolated incidents. I welcome the HTC folks to get in touch and help to clarify the situation. I'm not optimistic that they will, however, as in my experience Taiwan companies are not so great at issues management and external communications.

It seems the issue is at least being taken seriously by the tech media.

UK powerhouse The Register reports the following:

"Peeved HTC smartphone owners offer bounty for driver fix: A Web site is offering HTC smartphone customers a US$3,000 financial reward
if they're able to solve a series of graphics and related issues affecting the company's recent handsets, allegedly caused by missing or
poorly performing hardware drivers."

The HTCClassAction.org guys have gotten some apparently off-the-record acknowledgement of the problems from internal HTC sources. This sounds like yet another example of a befuddled local company getting slammed for an issue and being unable to offer a coordinated, satisfactory response.

Either way, let's wait and see how this pans out.

Hopefully, HTC will do the right thing and everyone will be happy. I'd hate for the world to have yet another reason not to trust Taiwan companies.

More to come
--jag