27 October 2008 13:23 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott
HTC boss Peter Chou has revealed how many G1s the company expects to shift this year - and the figure is nowhere near the 1.5 million that has been rumoured as the number of pre-orders the phone received.Reports from the States in the lead up to the device's launch suggested that T-Mobile had seen as many as 1.5 million pre-orders for the new smartphone, based on Google's Android operating system, but it appears this is not the case.
Chou said, in an interview with Mercury News: "We should be doing good numbers, but I can't disclose the details. It will be more than what we originally planned. I'm saying we will ship more than 600,000."
Apple recently revealed it has sold nearly 7 million iPhones globally in its last financial quarter.
When pressed on next year's figures, Chou was equally discrete: "We don't disclose particular product numbers. Even Apple doesn't provide those kinds of forward-looking numbers. But in general, we think we can do more next year. We are confident about our competitiveness next year."
Considering the industry as a whole, the HTC boss predicts that smartphones will start to become as-standard phones for consumers, rather than higher-end offerings:
"My gut feeling is 40 to 50% of mobile phones could be these kinds of converged data devices within the next five years... The market size for this kind of product could be 500 million to 700 million." Phones, Android, Mobile phones, HTC, T-Mobile, Google, Biz, Statistics
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