It’s too early for HTC to put all its eggs in one virtual basket

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas served as a stage for the latest version of HTC’s ambitious virtual reality headset, the HTC Vive. While the company received largely positive coverage for the room-scale VR implementation, it had one conspicuous absence from the show: smartphones.

A company whose very history has mirrored the explosive growth and subsequent saturation of the phone market neglected to show off even a single new handset at the world’s largest tech trade show. At CES 2015, HTC launched the Desire 826; the prior year, it had two new phones to unveil, the Desire 610 and Desire 816. Back at CES 2011, it helped AT&T introduce one of the first 4G phones in America, the HTC Inspire 4G.