I maintain the One would have been the best phone of the year if they just added a bloody MicroSD slot. 32GB is decent but not enough if you can record 1080p video at decent quality like you can with the One. Also, the camera was ridiculous, I liked the low light photo ability of it but Lumia 920 was just as good and also took good day light photos. To me, the lack of removeable battery isn't a worry as I am always near a PC and the battery life was surprisingly good.
It saddens me to see HTC do so badly as their phones are so nice but there's always just a few silly niggly things they do to stop them being 9/10 phones. Same with their Windows Phones. 8X and 8S are nice devices but again, limited storage (Inexcusible as WP8 supports microSD card) makes them less attactive vs the (Nokia) competition.
Nope it got the main feature of the year wrong, it had a 4.7" screen in the body of a 5" phone. Seriously, the One is the same size as the X-Z and larger than the S4, but it has a smaller screen. It also has a shit camera like you pointed out, plus most people I know have an absolute aversion to Sense. Removable batteries are not a big deal, it's a nice to have, so are microSD slots tbh, plenty of phones sell well without having either and the way Android works at the moment it's clear that Google are doing whatever they can to marginalise the use of sd cards and push internal storage.
They need to rebrand their software, stick to the script when it comes to screen size and cameras and market their phones better, people having a party around a phone speaker is not a good advert neither is RDJ standing around at a car wash.
A HTC One with a 5" screen with the same panel type and a 13MP camera or even the 8MP 1/3" that Apple are using for the 5S would have been a shit load better than the ultrapixel crap. Honestly, they must have read US based blogs complaining about plastic, too many megapixels and screens getting too big then decided that the HTC One would satisfy those needs, even though the most successful OEMs use plastic, pump up the MP count whenever possible and use larger and larger screens. I don't think anyone in the history of phones cares so much about the sound quality of the speakers enough to actually increase the size of their device by 1cm on the top and bottom, so that is definitely a "High Tech Computer" moment.
The One X was a solid phone, it got some stuff right, but it also got a load of stuff wrong, that it got outsold by the massively inferior Xperia S is just tragic as well. The One should have fixed everything that the One X didn't get right. That has been Samsung, Apple and now Sony's major strength, each iteration of their flagship device fixes shit from the previous one, none of them really reinvent the wheel. Take the S4 and S3 as an example, people complained about PenTile, Samsung fixed it with S-Stripe which is good enough, people complained about shitty battery life, Samsung stuck in a mega battery, people complained that phones were getting too unweildy, Samsung made the S4 fit into the same size envelope as the S3. The same is true for Apple when they shift to the S version of their phones, and Sony now with the Z and Z1.
HTC felt the need to reinvent the wheel with the One, but it has, in fact, led to lower shipments YoY. If they had got the One and One Mini both out at the same time in April and then got the Max out in July (like the ZU) with S800, they may have had a competitive year, but as it was, the One was dominated by the S4 and undercut by the Z. The Mini is a complete and utter joke and the Max is about to get destroyed by the Note 3 and ZU (the latter is selling out stock as soon as it comes in apparently).
Not to mention that Peter Chou vacated the low end in SE-Asia/China/India which Sony were only too happy to fill with the L, M and C (all of which are doing well). Plus a bunch of Chinese mainland companies have muscled them out of the mid-high end in HK while their market share in Japan is basically zero, though that's mostly due to a resurgent Sony with the Xperia Z and A on NTT and UL on KDDI.
The lesson in all of this is that HTC made a lot of mistakes, most of them they went into with their eyes wide open too, which is just insane. Any phone market analyst could have told them that going into a 5" screen battle with a 4.7" screen is like taking a knife to a shootout. HTC were outgunned by Samsung and outmanoeuvred by Sony. The latter should be particularly painful for them because there was a point in time (just after the Xperia X1 released) that Sony offered to sell their 50% stake in Sony Ericsson to Ericsson and use the proceeds to buy HTC but Peter Chou basically said no, we will beat you in the marketplace, why should we sell to you, from that decision HTC as a brand was born and they stopped being an ODM to larger companies like SE.
Anyway, enough of my rambling...
Edit: Honourable mention for LG who kicked the shit out of them with the Nexus 4 and opened up the US market for the G2. HTC declining the third Nexus still haunts them to this day.
