It's their first one in ages. They're trying to re-enter the market. The hardware is pretty good. Not the most cutting edge, but you get the headphone jack and a microsd card slot back, and at $600 it's way better than the $1,200 bullshit samsung and apple have been trying to shill.
If they embraced the mod community it could be a semi-official pixel replacement. They were always pretty good among oems about low bloat, if they just threw out stock and made only unlocked phones, could even have custom toms pre installed as an option if they really wanted to shake up the market. On of the costs for oems was supporting software updates that fit their bloat into the new android versions--they were always behind Google which was one of the original value propositions for Nexus line before Pixel. With Google going full Evil, there is a spot for someone else to take up the hardware crown.
Me too. Their needs to be more competition in the US market. I blame the three phone carriers laft. Their phone contracts only offer the most off to Samsung and Apple. In sure Samsung and Apple pay to have it that way, of course.
I feel like I remember Google buying them for the IP. I didn't know the company existed as a separate entity. I'll take it as a good thing. I had a couple of HTC phones back in the day.