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Neil Holloway, Microsoft, takes over the HTC sales promotion as Taipei moves to London

You don't expect hard news when a company announces a new office, and HTC didn't surprise us, when it arrived in London - or Slough - but at least it managed to roll out the big guns. "Microsoft is a very cheap source of advertising for us," quipped HTC president, Peter Chou.

Chou was announcing the successful theft of former Orange Florian Seiche, who is taking over as HTC VP in charge of Europe - which meant that he had to invite Orange exec VP, Vivek Badrinath; which meant he also had to invite T-Mobile Chief Executive, Rene Oberman... all to reveal that HTC has sold maybe 10 million smartphones.

Nonsurprises: that HTC will continue being exclusively Windows Mobile; that it hopes to sell the Qtek 8310 WiFi phone through Vodafone, that HTC isn't going to try to compete with Motorola on the $30 phone, or with Linux (duh). Oh, and T-Mobile thinks the mobile Internet is where it's all going to happen.

A slight surprise: Peter Chou said he accepted that there were markets where he'd have to pursue a low-price, low-profit strategy. And that was that.

And "cheap advertising"? It was a reference by Chou to the fact that he can display three photographs of top Microsofties advertising his gear. Bill Gates launched the first SPV phone, holding it up at a major convention. Steve Ballmer did the same for the next; and the latest, the 3G PDA/phone, was again used by Bill Gates as the prize token for the success of Windows Mobile 5.0 earlier this year.

Really, getting Neil Holloway to stand up at the launch of the UK office is pretty small beer by comparison...

Tags: HTC, smartphone, Windows Mobile, T-Mobile, Motorola, Linux