This is the exact reason HTC are struggling. These big American brands think their brand is more important than HTC's. They force HTC to sell under some other name, hence forcing them into a situation where they cannot market their brand or phone effectively.
The M7 was supposed to be marketed under one umbrella brand throughout the world & Verizon have fecked that up for them. Now their customers will be confused and they will lose out on sales.
If this story is true then Verizon are bullies and HTC should have refused to sell them the phone unless it carried their branding.
well htc is kinda screwed both ways
samsung can say take it or leave it to verizon with rebranding their devices because its always assumed now, that anything they launch will be a huge success and verizon doesnt want to miss that boat (though they did cater to verizon with "locked" bootloaders on gs3/note2)
htc seems to want to bend over backwards to sell any devices they can, and if verizon makes a request for something, they ll do anything they can to accommodate it....but in doing this, they further erode sales and brand recognition, so it only gets worse
if htc had stuck to their "plan" with the one series, i think they d have been more successful in 2012....they should have only launched 3 phones in the first world (i know super cheap phones in south america, asia are big to the bottom line, so im excluding those areas for the sake of this argument) : the one x, one s, and one v
i think you could still let carriers have somewhat customized versions (evo lte was a huge seller for sprint) but keep the launches on the same dates and dont lessen the device experience for an individual carrier (heck the evo lte is better than the one x cuz of the sdcard...and well maybe the kick stand if thats your thing)
then like samsung, when you release the next thing 8-10 months later, its simply the one x2, one s2, one v2 like the gs line for samsung
easy to recognize, and doesnt cannablize sales from their own lines unlike the one sv, one vx, desire c, desire x, and the 10 other htc low-to mid range devices launched recently
hopefully the m7 is a huge success for htc, and hopefully verizon's version is a distinct offering, that doesnt muddle the line w/ the dna by trying to call it the dna+ (when you ll have customers in store confused and possibly even arguing that a smaller screen cant be a better phone)
my .02
