HTC Touch At A Glance
Just got back from an HTC Touch event at the Bryant Park Hotel here in NYC. Had a chance to go into the phone a bit, learn about what it can do, and went home with one. The video above should give you a general feel of how it looks and interacts with touch.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Touch is the moment HTC steps out from behind the carrier logo. The company had already been described in prior coverage as a low-profile powerhouse rivaling Motorola and Nokia in designing and selling wireless devices, and it now claims to be the world's leading provider of Microsoft Windows Mobile smart devices — but a press event at Manhattan's Bryant Park Hotel, with reporters sent home with review units, is brand-building behavior, not ODM behavior.
The product logic is laid out in HTC's own announcement: a global launch promising "finger touch navigation" on a platform that has been stylus-driven, followed by Michael Gartenberg's same-day first take crediting HTC with leading Windows Mobile innovation and calling both the hardware and the market strategy dead-on. Earlier in March, the company had already previewed the candybar-style P5500 (Nike) with GPS, so the Touch sits inside an unusually active 2007 release cadence for a vendor most consumers still couldn't name.
First-order effects
- Windows Mobile suddenly has a flagship that competes on touch interaction rather than specs-and-stylus, forcing reviewers and buyers to judge Microsoft's platform by HTC's interface layer instead of the OS defaults.
- HTC is spending marketing money on its own name — a New York press event and seeded units — converting its behind-the-scenes manufacturing reputation into consumer-brand equity.
Second-order effects
- Competitors named in HTC's own orbit — Motorola and Nokia among them — face pressure to answer a finger-driven interface on their own smartphone lines rather than concede the touch category.
- Carriers and Microsoft gain a reason to let device makers differentiate on top-of-OS software, since the Touch sells the platform precisely by papering over it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, handset value migrates toward manufacturers who own the user-experience layer over a licensed OS — the structure where the device maker's interface, not the operating system or the operator, is what customers actually buy.
- A successful branded push by a former contract-style vendor points toward a market where design-led Asian manufacturers compete head-to-head with Motorola- and Nokia-class incumbents rather than supplying them.
The trend: Handset vendors are shifting from building phones for other people's brands to owning the consumer relationship through touch-first interfaces layered over licensed operating systems.