Unfortunately there’s no mention of dates for the One X and the One V, the other devices in the series, at the stage, according to the screenshots that are said to come from the operator’s employee training program. However, HTC is widely expected to bring the three devices to market at some point this month.

The imminent launch of the range, which was unveiled in February at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, comes at a time when HTC has reported a troubling set of weak earnings for the first quarter of 2012.

Amongst the figures, the Taiwanese firm saw net revenue for the three month period decrease 35 percent year-on-year, while net profit plunged by 70 percent.

HTC believes that by concentrating on ‘hero’ phones, it can reverse its decline and intensify competition in the smartphone market again. The One S is very much a key to that and it will be interesting to observe the reaction that its launch receives in the US.

The One range gained glowing praise from The Next Web’s news and mobile editor Matt Brian, who gave them a spin in Barcelona and can’t wait for the full release:

Playing with the devices, it is clear to see that HTC is back to its best, offering sleek, sexy devices that have the necessary power and features to make consumers consider them from their competition.

We’ll keep you posted with more details as we find them.

Smartphone maker HTC this morning released unaudited financial results for the first quarter of 2012. Given the company’s previously released figures for January and February, HTC was widely expected to report a pretty disastrous quarter in light of intensifying rivalry in the smartphone business and a slowing global economy. The company didn’t disappoint.

For the first quarter of 2012, total HTC revenues reached NT$67,790 million (roughly $2.3 billion), a decrease of nearly 35 percent year-on-year. This in line with HTC’s earlier projections – its outlook for total revenues in Q1 2012 was “between NT$65 billion and NT$70 billion”.

For your comparison: in the fourth quarter of 2011, HTC revenue was NT$101.42 billion ($3.43 billion).

Net income before tax in Q1 2012 was NT$5,551 million (approximately $180 million), while net income after tax came in at NT$4,464 million (roughly $151 million).

That’s a staggering 70 percent decline compared to net profits the company booked in the same period last year.

HTC believes that by concentrating on ‘hero’ phones, it can reverse its decline and intensify competition in the smartphone market again. The company recently introduced its One range of Android smartphones, focusing on solid hardware and software features rather than a hardware specification bump.

We recently put HTC’s new flagship device — the One X — through its paces.

The Next Web’s Matt Brian deemed the phone “without question a return to form for HTC, providing a very real competitor to Apple and Samsung in the burgeoning smartphone market”. Only time will tell if HTC can turn the tide.

One of its chief rivals, Samsung, just announced that it forecasts a $5.1 billion profit in Q1 2012 on strong sales of its flagship Galaxy smartphones and the new Note, with total revenues estimated to reach $39 billion for the quarter.

And HTC’s other main competitor, Apple, is what I like to call ‘hors catégorie’.

Two weeks ago, we reported that Kodak was looking into filing for bankruptcy if it couldn’t sell off enough of its patents. Kodak licenses some these to companies like LG, Motorola, and Nokia. A week after that report, Kodak sued both Apple and HTC for infringing on some of those patents.

Today, the company is adding Samsung to the list of those being sued for patent infringement. The lawsuit singles out Samsung tablets specifically for using some of its technology without asking. The patents that Kodak says Samsung is using without permission center around the automatic handling of photos, such as sending them through email. Here are the five in question:

U.S. Patent No. 6,292,218 – “Electronic Camera For Initiating Capture of Still Images While Previewing Motion Images”
U.S. Patent No. 7,210,161 – “Automatically Transmitting Images from an Electronic Camera to a Service Provider Using a Network Configuration File”
U.S. Patent No. 7,742,084 – “Network Configuration File for Automatically Transmitting Images from an Electronic Still Camera”
U.S. Patent No. 7,453,605 – “Capturing Digital Images to be Transferred to an E-Mail Address”
U.S. Patent No. 7,936,391 – “Digital Camera with Communications Interface for Selectively Transmitting Images over a Cellular Phone Network and a Wireless LAN Network to a Destination”

It appears that these patents involving the transmission of photos are the same ones the company is suing Apple and HTC over. Before it sells off its patents or files for bankruptcy, the company must defend its assets, and the company certainly isn’t being quiet about it. As our own Brad McCarty points out, Kodak has become a dinosaur in digital photography, since it hasn’t executed on its own social offerings:

Kodak has been touting its social sharing functions for the past couple of years and the idea behind them is good. However, the implementation is simply incomplete. Instead of having a one-touch share button that allowed you to directly upload to Facebook, that button allows you to flag a picture. Then you have to hook up your camera to your computer, use Kodak’s software and finally upload it to the service of your choice.

If Kodak is going down, it certainly isn’t going down quietly. However, it looks like most of the damage to the company was self-inflicted.

HTC the Taiwanese manufacturer, posted a video today on its YouTube channel displaying a brand new device. We’re not sure what the device is or if this was a leak, but according to a recent post from Engadget, they mention their tipster suggested that it could be the Wildfire 2.  And, we’ve also been hearing around the web that based on an inventory leak, it will likely be called HTC Wildfire S.

The video below begins on a beach and sports a sexy new device that appears after the guy on the beach turns over a rock. If you look closely, you can see it’s very similar to the original Wildfire device.