Thoughts on HTC's iPhone competitor

Clearly, I favor Microsoft products, which shouldn't surprise anyone. I was a fan of the company's technology long before I was employed by them in May of 2005.

This means that I want Windows Mobile to respond properly to some of the innovations popularized in the iPhone. Fortunately, that appears to be happening. HTC, a Chinese company with a long history of building phones that run Windows Mobile (as I recall, they were the manufacturer of one of the first Windows Smartphone sold in Europe through a major mobile service provider...which happened to be Orange Communications, a company for which I worked at the time), is rolling out the HTC Touch, a phone built like the iPhone around a larger than normal touch-sensitive screen. HTC designed the touch-sensitive software which drives the user interface, and though it doesn't have the 4-8gb of Flash RAM built in that is present in the iPhone, it does come with a miniSD slot.

It's an interesting concept, though whether or not customers will gravitate to a keyboardless smartphone is still an open question. Krakow found the on-screen keyboard unusable without a stylus, a problem the iPhone may or may not face, depending on their approach to text entry.

One thing a Windows Mobile platform has going for it, however, is customizability. That's one of the reasons enterprises that choose a common phone platform have favored Windows Mobile (the better to use those Windows development skills), and is what enabled Matthew Miller over at Mobile Gadgeteer to solve the problem. He took for a spin various keyboard alternatives available for Windows Mobile platforms and found they offered better finger-oriented functionality than the integrated default.

Customizability, I think, should be at the center of everything Microsoft does, because Microsoft is, at heart, a software company. Microsoft succeeds best when they make everything they create customizable, weaving it into a common development infrastructure that binds the growing Microsoft ecosystem cross-device. It was that flexibility that first attracted me to the Microsoft platform, and is Microsoft's most compelling answer to open source competition. No, Microsoft won't release the source code for most of its products (though I don't think it would hurt if they released more), but it will be customizable and reusable, and doing so will be easier than is possible with alternatives.

That line of thinking should apply equally to Microsoft's burgeoning hardware properties. Microsoft is a software company. It should act like one, even when its making hardware, because that's Microsoft's competitive advantage.

Apple has at the core of its business its hardware and user interface design skills. Though Microsoft would do well to develop such in-house competency (and is, through it's XBOX team), Microsoft can't - and shouldn't - escape its DNA. Microsoft products should always be the customizable alternative, which is a developer-oriented feature, but a nice middle ground between some of its biggest competitors.