HTC’s Touch helps Sprint Nextel in marathon: Touchscreen, UI, Touchscreen, UI, fortunes

Simplicity.
Invisible technology that brings consumers emotional satisfaction.
A fun user interface that enables the work/play overlap.
A company not from Cupertino, Calif., but from another center of innovation: MAGIC Labs at HTC Corp. in Taipei, Taiwan-a lean, hungry player that is slicing and dicing the smartphone market in partnership with Microsoft Corp., which licenses its Windows Mobile OS to HTC.
Enter: Sprint Nextel Corp., badly in need of a wondrous gadget to reverse falling subscriber numbers.
Just understand that the HTC Touch, on sale Nov. 5, was in development long before the iPhone surfaced and that HTC, too, has a computing heritage that is beginning to pay off in the fast-growing smartphone field.
John Wang, chief marketing officer and “chief innovation wizard” at HTC, cut through the fog created by many smartphone purveyors at last week’s CTIA I.T. & Entertainment 2007 event in San Francisco.
Rather than discussing features, Wang explained that “simplicity is easy to talk about, difficult to do.”
“We discovered that if we wanted to advance the industry, we had to address simplicity by creating a direct, intuitive user interface.”
The result was TouchFLO, a touchscreen interface that allows swiping or scrolling with a finger, use with a stylus and three buttons. The visual menu choices are described by a cube that can be spun ’round with the touch of a finger.
“Do you care about the user experience?” Wang asked rhetorically. “If you do, you must examine every aspect of that experience.”
That led Wang’s MAGIC Labs team to develop the ease-of-use elements for the Touch’s user interface, built on top of Windows Mobile.
“Windows Mobile is a flexible platform,” Wang said. “We want to leverage that. Ultimately, we are accountable for the user experience through the user interface. We are free to build value on top of Windows Mobile.”
“This whole discussion is not for the end user,” he added. “Technology should be invisible.”
Invisible technology that produces a pleasing user experience is Wang’s goal.
That was good enough for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who during his keynote address at last week’s CTIA I.T. event brandished the Touch and mentioned it and Sprint Nextel repeatedly as he extolled his own company’s efforts towards the same goal.
For Sprint Nextel, clearly, Ballmer brandishing a device that can go head-to-head with the iPhone at rival AT&T Mobility, which is surging in subscriber adds, can only help.
While Sprint Nextel was not able to discuss the device last week due to executives’ hectic traveling schedules, the carrier has a lot riding on the Touch as a halo product for the struggling carrier. While AT&T Mobility snagged the iPhone, Verizon Wireless is set to launch LG Electronics Co. Ltd.’s Voyager smartphone and T-Mobile USA Inc. is in the process of launching new Sidekick models
the Touch may keep Sprint Nextel competitive in the critical image game.
Consumers may well decide that the $250 Touch beats the $400 iPhone, not to mention the bevy of other smartphones on offer. Analysts, by nature, are more skeptical.
“It’s more like a fashionable, scifi prop than a regular phone,” said Avi Greengart, analyst at Current Analysis. “It’s comparable to the LG Prada or the iPhone. It’s design and ‘hand feel’ is in the same league.”
More good news for HTC and Sprint Nextel: Greengart said that the CDMA version launching at the carrier is superior in performance to the GSM version launched earlier across the globe. Improvements include a doubling of processing speed as well as random-access memory and read-only memory. The virtual keypad is larger and more finger-friendly, the analyst said. And Wi-Fi was swapped out in favor of Sprint Nextel’s CDMA2000 1x EV-DO network speeds, a “fair trade,” in Greengart’s view.
Still, the prior version sold more than 800,000 units in two months, according to HTC, even when up against Nokia Corp.’s N95 premier smartphone offering.
“It will sell well in the U.S.,” Greengart said. “Sprint needs this. Every carrier offers touchscreens and they’re not a fad. And it’s not just about Apple. $250 is eminently reasonable for such a device. It’s huge for brand building. Both parties need something like this.”
But analysts do not earn their bread-and-butter by dishing up compliments alone.
“Here’s where the device falls down,” Greengart said, mincing no words. “The HTC touchscreen is not as responsive as the iPhone. It doesn’t have a third sense of your intent.”
In some actions, fingers are appropriate until, suddenly, the user must resort to a stylus to complete the action.
“They have more work to do,” Greengart concluded.
But that’s not the sort of challenge that hungry HTC is likely to shrink from, when you speak with Wang.
Mention the hullabaloo over Apple’s iPhone and Wang smiles patiently. He graciously credits Apple with raising the industry’s consciousness and acknowledges others’ touchscreen efforts, while retaining the dignity of a true pioneer.
“It’s been a real journey,” Wang said. “The mobile-phone industry couldn’t sustain its momentum simply by adding more features.”