Location-based deals service are all the rage at the moment on mobile, with the recent success of vouchercodes.co.uk and O2 Priority Moments. So it should come as no surprise that HTC appears to be working on an app of its own to start offering up HTC Sense users sweet offers as they walk down the street.
At a press briefing last week, we discovered a curious new app onboard the prototype HTC Explorer we were shown, called Best Deals. It wouldn’t open as the phone had not been logged into a HTC Sense account, but when pressed for details, HTC’s director of commercialisation product management Graham Wheeler told Electricpig that it was an experimental location-based offers service app the Taiwanese company had been toying with internally.
Wheeler did not provide any details beyond this, and could not say if it would be pre-loaded on the HTC Explorer at launch, or even if it would ever be officially released under that name or any other.
HTC says it “can’t comment on unannounced products or services”, but its presence on the Explorer suggests that if it is launched, it could eventually come as standard on every HTC Android phone in future. Other HTC services such as Connected Media, a DLNA streaming app, Locations, a GPS mapping service, and HTC Watch, an iTunes-style movie and TV show download app, have typically been reserved for more expensive phones with 800MHz or higher processors compared to the Explorer’s 600MHz CPU.
Earlier this month, HTC revealed that it would be providing 5GB of free data with cloud storage service Dropbox for new HTC Sense Android users in future.
What deals would you like to see on your HTC phone? Do you use other offers apps? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
