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Bonnie Cha at Crave is reporting that hot phone maker HTC has acquired the San Francisco-based design firm One & Company Design, Inc (One & Co). 

One & Co is the company that worked with HTC in designing the HTC S740, HTC Touch Diamond, Touch Pro, and Touch HD. Beyond HTC their client list reads like a who’s who of big time, hip companies with strong brand identities, such as Adidas, Nike, TiVo, Apple, Sony, K2 Snowboards, Coca-Cola, Kodak, and the North Face. According to Cha, One & Co’s 17 employees will collaborate more closely now with HTC’s design teams in Taiwan and Seattle to create HTC’s 2009 portfolio. One & Co will continue to work with outside clients however, which should be a nice additional income stream for HTC once the acquisition goes through.

Regarding the purchase, One & Co partner Scott Croyle says:

One & Co is excited to bring our lifestyle, user focused approach to HTC and we look forward to creating iconic, compelling products together. Knowing about HTC’s cutting edge technology and proven track record of innovation, we are excited to collaborate with HTC as a global lifestyle brand.

The fact that HTC is actually buying the freelance company that is credited with being the vision behind their most successful recent phones like the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro shows that HTC is fully committed to going toe to toe with Apple and Nokia in terms of pure design. The days of thick, rectangular hockey pucks from HTC like the Mogul are gone forever it seems, and I think this is a very wise business move. The smartphone market is only going to become more competitive in the tough economic times ahead, so it pays for them to invest the cash now to be certain their design direction will be solid and consistent in the future. Strong design matters more and more to phone consumers, and if you look at One & Co’s body of work, it is clear they have a handle on what tech buyers and consumers alike want to see in new devices. Having them in-house will be a long term savings for HTC and make them even more agile in a rapidly changing space.

Zealot (446 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).