HTC cashes in on gold trend with 18ct handset worth £2,750

Apple and Samsung have already made gold-coloured smartphones; HTC just went straight for the gold

Beleaguered phone-maker HTC recently blamed their falling revenue on a “the challenge of innovative marketing” but a new all-gold edition of their HTC One handset shows that the company might still be suffering from a slight lack of imagination.

However, they certainly get points for carrying things to extremes. Whilst Apple and Samsung have released only gold colourings for their flagship smartphones, HTC have gone the whole hog - using 18ct gold-plating to create five limited-edition HTC Ones, valued at £2,750 each.

The handsets have been produced to promote the 18th anniversary of the MOBO awards and include the music award’s logo laser-etched onto the back plate of the HTC One.

Although the Taiwanese company posted its first quarterly loss last week, the HTC One has continued to do well with critics. The phone took home three prizes at the T3 awards show last week: Phone of the Year, Gadget of the Year and the T3 Design Award.

The HTC One includes a 4.7-inch 1080p screen, 32 or 64GB of internal storage, 2GB of RAM and a quad-core 1.7GHz processor.

In an interview with Bloomberg on Monday, HTC’s Chairwoman Cher Wang said that the company’s next two months would be its “biggest challenge” and that although the company has “the best technology and product” it is failing to communicate its strengths to customers.