Google completes $1.1bn purchase of HTC’s engineering talent

The move should also cut costs for HTC: the 2,000 employees leaving for Google represent half of HTC’s R&D group and 20 percent of its 10,000 employees. What they will bring with the Pixel 3 is anyone’s guess. HTC even designed the short-lived Nexus 9 tablet along with Google, so the history is there.

The company is now more focused on its Vive Virtual Reality business along with the Internet of Things, Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence.

“You have to be vertical in some cases to really push the envelope for consumers”, Osterloh said. Longer term Google may hope to develop its own main processors to replace the Qualcomm Snapdragon processors that it uses today, in the same way that Apple’s smartphones are already powered by its own proprietary range of main processors.

HTC has confirmed that the deal won’t affect its product roadmap.

HTC set the standard in mobile for many years and with the HTC U11 everything I’ve wanted in an HTC phone is provided.

The company was earlier reported to have incorporated a custom chip called the Pixel Visual Core, but its functionality is less advanced compared to what the brain of the smartphone or SoC will be capable of doing.

Taipei will become the biggest research and development center of Google Inc., which completed a deal on Tuesday to acquire a large part of Taiwan’s HTC Corp.’s smartphone assets, a Google executive said Tuesday.

To make better iPhone rivals, Google needs to replicate Apple’s hardware and software integration.

Meanwhile, HTC says it’s working on a new flagship to follow up this year’s HTC U11. By contrast, Samsung is estimated to have shipped more than 300 million smartphone units previous year. Other Android manufacturers “know why we’re doing this”, Osterloh tells Bloomberg in an interview. However, with Pixel phones, the company is aiming to dent Apple’s market share. The search giant had penned a deal with HTC to scoop up about half of its research and design division.