• Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Friday, October 29, 2010 10:48 AM

Two years ago, Bruce Einhorn reports, Taiwan's HTC was virtually unknown in the U.S. Now it's the market leader in Android phones -- the only segment of the market that's growing faster than Apple's iPhone.

HTC got its first big break when Microsoft awarded it a contract to make smartphones in 2002. It set up U.S. headquarters close to Microsoft's home office and quickly became the world's top producer of Windows phones.

But CEO Peter Chou worried that a brandless HTC would forever remain a low-margin manufacturer of commodity products. "We were doing pretty well, we were making a lot of profit," he says. "But we were mostly minor partners" for telecom operators that bought and resold HTC phones.

HTC's director of user experience Drew Bamford says he plans to make Android phones better able to access video, music, and other content and is teaming up with U.S. e-commerce site Kobo to sell e-books and hopes to sign deals with Amazon and Barnes & Noble. There's also a rumor of an Android-powered tablet PC to compete with the iPad.

Read the whole story at Bloomberg BusinessWeek »