HTC was planning their own phone customization site
Motorola may be the first OEM to market with a fully customizable color scheme for a smartphone, but it looks like they weren’t the only ones thinking about it. New information obtained by the folks at The Verge suggests HTC was thinking about this feature as well. According to them, the company was looking to introduce the “HTC Design Studio,” a service that isn’t unlike Motorola’s Moto Maker for the Moto X (for which we recently ran a contest).
The original idea was to allow customers to customize the colors of one of HTC’s Windows Phones for Sprint — the HTC 8XT — but the plans were reportedly scrapped due to concerns over complexity. Apparently, the HTC Design Studio was even more flexible than the Moto Maker, as it would have allowed you to change individual colors for the camera ring, the speaker grill, the body and the various accents going around the device.
I can only imagine how much more popular HTC’s 2013 Android flagship — the HTC One — might have been had it launched with similar options. We may never know at this point, but perhaps Motorola’s willingness to get the ball rolling on the customization front with the Moto X will inspire HTC (and others) to think about providing deep customization options for flagship phones in the future.