Sprint to introduce touch-screen phone
NEW YORK - It's official: touch screens are the big new thing in cell phones this holiday season. — Sprint Nextel Corp. announced Wednesday it is jumping on the bandwagon with the Touch by HTC. Like Apple Inc.'s iPhone, this smart phone …
Context & Ripple Effects
HTC introduced the Touch back in June 2007 as its answer to finger-driven navigation, but this announcement is about distribution: Sprint Nextel is putting the device on shelves for the holiday quarter, four months after the June debut. The move slots into a busy year of Windows Mobile hardware on Sprint's EV-DO network — the carrier added the slide-out HTC Mogul just weeks before.
The framing in both the wire copy and Sprint's own release makes the comparison explicit: the iPhone reset what consumers expect a premium phone's interface to look like, and carriers without access to Apple's exclusive are shopping for substitutes rather than conceding the category.
First-order effects
- Sprint enters the holiday selling season with a touch-screen smart phone of its own instead of ceding the category entirely to AT&T's iPhone exclusive.
- HTC converts its June hardware launch into US carrier scale, gaining a national CDMA channel for a device it had been selling largely on its own.
Second-order effects
- Rival carriers locked out of the iPhone deal face pressure to field comparable touch-screen handsets this season, pushing vendors like HTC to position Windows Mobile hardware against Apple's interface rather than just its specs.
Third-order effects
- If every major carrier needs a touch-screen flagship, the interface stops being a differentiator and becomes table stakes — shifting competition toward what runs on the glass (OS, services, network) and accelerating Windows Mobile's consumer-facing redesign cycle.
The trend: Carriers without iPhone access are racing to source touch-screen handsets, turning Apple's 2007 interface into the default template for premium phones across the industry.