Guides and howtos related to digital video and software associated to it. Despite its primary competitor, Oculus, making a major price cut to the Rift Touch earlier this year, HTCs Vive headset still sits at a hearty 800. The company. Google Is Close to Buying HTC Assets to Bolster Hardware. Alphabet Inc. s Google is close to acquiring assets from Taiwans HTC Corp., according to a person familiar with the situation, in a bid to bolster the internet giants nascent hardware business. By owning a manufacturer, Google could gain tighter control over production of its new Pixel smartphone and other devices, helping it ramp up sales. Those gadgets are fast becoming the pillars of Googles strategic push to keep critical software products, such as its voice enabled assistant, in circulation, contain costs in its main advertising business and better compete with Apple Inc. HTC, once ranked among the worlds top smartphone makers, is holding a town hall meeting with employees Thursday, according to tech reporter Evan Blass, who cited a copy of an internal invitation. The shares will also be suspended from trading as of Sept. Taiwan stock exchange. Google and HTC declined to comment. HTC has been working with an adviser to explore selling its handset and virtual reality businesses, and Google has been talking with the company, Bloomberg reported last month. Htc Touch 2 Sync Software' title='Htc Touch 2 Sync Software' />With the Taurus, Ford Sync with MyFord Touch is standard on the SHO and Limited models, available as an 800 upgrade on the SEL, but not available on the SE. Make sure your Windows PC is Oculus Ready Run the Oculus Rift compatibility checker to quickly see if your PC is ready for the Rift experience. Apple Daily said Wednesday that Google will buy HTCs mobile phone original design operations for about NT1. Google will keep the HTC brand and take on about 1. HTC engineers, the website reported, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. Alphabet investors may be concerned about history repeating itself. Google has tried to buy its way into hardware twice before, albeit more expensively. Those efforts largely fell short and the associated expenses slimmed Googles margins. But its third try comes at a very different time when Google and its biggest rivals are more focused than ever on consumer devices built around new artificial intelligence and augmented reality services. AR demands powerful, expensive cameras and sensors working in sync with special software to process and superimpose 3 D images on real world scenes. Drake Take Care Deluxe Edition Torrent. Having different Android manufacturers making their own phones with slightly different components makes this task more difficult for Google especially compared with Apple which can pick one set of AR hardware to marry to its software. Greater control over hardware production would also give Google more power over the distribution of those new services, like its voice based digital assistant. That would fix a major obstacle its Android software has faced compared with Apples i. Phones, and a more robust hardware division would solve a nagging problem in its internet advertising business. If you can control all of those, youre in firmer control of your own destiny, said Ramon Llamas, an analyst at market researcher IDC. In 2. 01. 2, the search giant paid 1. Motorola Mobility, a leading Android handset manufacturer. In less than three years, Google sold it off to Lenovo Group Ltd. In 2. 01. 4, Google dropped 3. Nest Labs, maker of connected thermostats and at the time Googles chosen vehicle for a design savvy device operation that could rival Apple Inc. But new products have been slow to reach the market and Nest was burdened with corporate drama that pushed out its chief executive, Tony Fadell, last year. This time around, Google already has a phone. The production resources of HTC, which assembled the first Google Pixel device, would fit into an existing phone operation rather than build it from scratch. In 2. 01. 6, Google hired Rick Osterloh, a former Motorola executive, to run its hardware division. That fall, his team introduced the Pixel, a high end smartphone priced like the i. Phone, and a speaker that competes with Amazon. Inc. s Echo. Osterloh is preparing to launch a newer model of the Pixel phone on Oct. Osterloh has often framed the Pixel as a reference point for consumers and other hardware makers for how Google sees software and hardware coming together. Owning HTCs unit could help Google push that vision forward, accelerating adoption of features around AI assistance and augmented reality, Eric Sheridan, an analyst at UBS, wrote in a research note. A more Apple like approach to smartphone production would also allow Google to steer Android in its preferred direction. The tech giant has struggled to get handset makers and carriers to ship Android devices with new, secure software. The Pixel was designed, in part, to prompt other Android phone makers to follow on the latest Google bells and whistles. Still, some Android partners are moving ahead with competing software efforts Huawei Technologies Co. Amazons assistant, and Samsung Electronics Co. Googles Pixel is far from a top selling phone. External estimates pegged sales at 5. Yet selling Pixels has auxiliary benefits for Google. Chief among them is the boost to its primary sales. With each Pixel phone it sells, Google doles out less in traffic acquisition costs, or TAC, the money it pays out to partners like Apple and carriers to install Googles search service. That cost has risen steadily, pulling down its sales totals last quarter in particular. A bigger hardware unit would mean a clear offset to TAC expenses, Sheridan wrote. But it also comes with more spending, in maintenance and marketing. Sheridan wrote that an HTC acquisition and larger Google hardware unit could hurt the companys profit margins. Soft Gelatin Hardness Tester more.