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Vodafone ditches HD2

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Mobile phone giant Vodafone said it will stop selling HTC's popular iPhone rival device, the HD2, causing anger among some of its customers.

In several discussion threads on the company's eForum at the tail end of this week, customers vented their anger at what they claimed to be mixed messages and deliberate obfuscation from the mobile network operator.

One even contacted a member of HTC's customer support team to be told by the handset maker: "We have not stopped supply of these phones to anyone including Vodafone."

Vodafone had maintained last week that it had simply run out of stock on the devices, and that it would begin shipping again when the new batch arrived, however, in a pretty unequivocal statement on the eForum on Thursday a spokesman posted the following update:

"We won't be re-stocking the HTC HD2 for general consumer sales once our current devices sell out. There's been a great deal of interest since we made the HTC HD2 available to buy in November and our initial supply quickly sold out.

"With subsequent deliveries of stock we've prioritised the fulfilment of back orders for the device. Given the wide and expanding range of smartphones available to Vodafone customers, including the iPhone in early 2010, we're confident that we continue to offer the broadest range of devices to our customers."

The move comes as something of a surprise given that the device was selling well and received pretty positive reviews on it launch earlier this year. Our V3.co.uk review gave the handset an overall rating of 4/5, labelling it "the best Windows phone we've ever seen".

13 Dec 2009

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<p>A hotfix has been available for this for well over a week, so no recall was necessary. There is another reason for this</p>

Posted by: Carl 15 Dec 2009

<p>I'm guessing this has something to do with the discovery of a defective camera on the phone.</p> <p>You might recall some recent news reports that the camera on the HTC HD2 has a fault that causes a pink circle in the middle of every photo. HTC would have had plenty of stocks of the phone ready for launch time. However, the pink camera defect threw a spanner into the works, and I suspect there may have been an internal recall of stocks, which would have caused the supply problems that Vodafone mentioned.</p> <p>By the time the situation is rectified, and supplies return to full, there will be other alternatives on the market, such as a slew of Android phones coming in January, that are more appealing to consumers.</p>

Posted by: Jock Stewart 13 Dec 2009

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