HTC is going hard on marketing, but is the One enough to make HTC relevant again?
This article may contain personal views and opinion from the author.

Even if the text of the ad isn't the best, the phone itself looks very interesting, which could be enough to get users interested. And, as we learned with our hands-on, the HTC One is designed beautifully. It looks gorgeous, and feels great in the hand. It's the kind of device that you want to touch when you see it, so that helps a lot in getting it into the hands of users. At least, it gets the device into the hands of people already in the store. Once the device is in the users' hands, we get to the last piece of the puzzle: UI.
HTC put in a lot of good work with the Sense UI. Some will say that the Sense 5.0 UI is borrowing heavily from Windows Phone, but the truth is that plenty of products have been moving to a graphically intensive tile arrangement for content: Windows Phone/Windows 8, Flipboard, Google+/Google Currents, Pulse, even the PhoneArena website and other news sites like The Verge. It's a pretty simple idea: you need something that conveys information and works well on touchscreens, and a graphically intensive tile layout is one of the best ways to do that. The one trouble with Sense 5.0 is that it is quite a departure from established Android UI design.
HTC obviously needed something different, because what it had been doing wasn't working, but to remove all widgets and anything that users typically associate with Android in favor of the new BlinkFeed. Whatever the reason you may choose to explain Samsung's dominance of the Android market, the TouchWiz UI never strays too far from stock Android. HTC is taking a big risk in pushing this much of a UI change. It looks good, and it could very well work. At the very least, we're hoping that it doesn't add any more time to Android updates than a standard UI would.
Conclusion
HTC is kind of going for broke with the HTC One. The company has steadily been losing ground in the smartphone race, so it has to be aggressive in order to make up ground. The company has abandoned the low-end market, and has been focusing on the high-end, but it still hasn't been able to make a dent in the market control Samsung and Apple have. We thought that the HTC One X last year was a pretty solid entry, but it didn't really make any waves. The new HTC One looks even better than the One X, and has the added benefits of coming to three of the four major US carriers, which the One X couldn't say, as well as having a possible headstart on the Samsung Galaxy S4. Getting on Verizon would give the One the best shot possible to generate some buzz and sales before the next flagship Galaxy hits the market, so we'll have to see if that works out. As is, the HTC One has the design and specs to be a success, but we need to see more from this new "Marketing 2.0" strategy before we get too optimistic.
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