HTC comes with BOOMB

HTC comes with Boomb speaker

Smartphone maker HTC is going through a tough time — and having something of an identity crisis that’s playing out as a rebranding exercise. That’s why it’s spent millions hiring Robert Downey Jr to spice things up with its Here’s To Change campaign. It’s also, apparently, got a few other attention-grabbing tricks up its sleeve. Such as the gizmo pictured above. Part vapourware, part steampunk fantasy, pure marketing madness.

No it’s not a leftover prop from the latest Tim Burton flick. The Gramohorn II — for that is its ludicrous name — is HTC UK’s contribution to the struggling mobile maker’s internal cultural revolution. What actually is it? It’s audio kit for the outré HTC One user: a passive speaker smartphone dock designed to grab the tiny timbres issuing from the phone’s front-facing speakers and flick them through its twin horns like a Pamplona bull dispatching a pair of overweight tourists.

Or actually that’s its secondary function, after the primary one of grabbing consumers’ eyeballs and rattling them in their sockets.

 

Layout for HTC Architecture

 

If it’s eyes on its logo HTC needs — actually it’s dollars in its coffers but the former tends to lead to the latter — then this mystical hardware unicorn is surely going to deliver. Not so much HTC as WTF?! But in the smartphone popularity contest where Samsung is the ruling Gladiator then anything is better than being invisible. So it’s out with ‘quietly brilliant’ and in with ‘WTF’ blared through a pair of oversized ear trumpets. Bravo HTC, bravo. Say what you like about the Gramohorn II but one thing is for sure: it’s not quietly brilliant.