Quietly Red: HTC unveils ad campaign, bringing Dragon to VZW as Passion?

HTC unveiled their first mainstream ad campaign this morning. Hinged around the tag line, "A phone that gets you," and the slogan "Quietly Brilliant," the campaign features print and video ads, has already hit YouTube, and should be permeating your psyche via various major media outlets around the globe over the coming weeks and months. The new campaign is a bold but, dare I say, timely move from a gadget maker long loved by cell phone nerds and US carriers (who've only recently started promoting the HTC name instead of just rebranding the handsets OEM style).

UPDATE: Nope! Looks like Dragon/Passion is a GSM device, not CDMA, and so won't be hitting Verizon, after all. More here.

Not content with merely pushing a bunch of marketing speak with no products to back it up, HTC is also rumored to be prepping a pair of Android phones for release on Verizon before the end of the year. We already know about the Eris, aka "Desire," which looks to be the Hero with a Verizon-spec'd makeover. Next up is the Passion, which theunlockr thinks will be the retail name for Verizon's version of the Dragon, a 1GHz Snapdragon-based Android phone that our own John Walton gave you the goods on a few weeks back and Engadget peeped over the weekend.

unlockr says Passion will hit Verizon stores before year's end, which would round out a huge holiday trio of Android devices for Big Red in Eris, Passion and, of course, the MOTO Droid. Actually, wait - if the Moto Calgary comes to be, we could see an entire quartet of Google OS phones with the Big Red V on 'em. Not bad for a carrier who's been getting bashed as of late for having "No decent smartphones" on its shelves.

The photo posted above also adds some weight to speculation about Verizon's strategy with the whole "Droid" Android sub-brand: Not only will "Droid" be VZW's flagship Android device, but it will also serve as the brand-within-a-brand for the carrier's Android initiative. Nilay at Engadget speculates that Verizon's been working hard on a unified look and feel to its Droid phones by way of four iconic buttons on the bottom edge of the displays a white notification bar within the UI itself. Verrrrry interesting ... 

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