The device everyone in this corner of the industry is waiting on is still going by Hermes, which is a codename, which means the interesting decision has not been announced yet. It is the follow-up to the Wizard, the slider most people know as a T-Mobile MDA or a Cingular 8125 depending on which shop sold it to them, and the spec jump is real: a 400MHz processor where the Wizard limped along at under two hundred, a proper 2.8 inch screen, Wi-Fi, and HSDPA radios in a world where barely anyone has an HSDPA network to connect them to.

Shipping 3.5G hardware into networks that do not exist yet sounds absurd and I think it is correct. These devices sit on operator shelves for eighteen months and get bought on two year contracts. Building for the network you have at launch is how you end up selling an obsolete phone in month nine.

None of that is what I actually care about here. The question hanging over this device is whose name ends up printed on the front of it.

HTC builds an enormous share of the Windows Mobile hardware in this market and almost nobody outside the trade knows the company exists, because every device leaves the factory wearing somebody else’s badge. O2 calls it an XDA. Orange calls it an SPV. T-Mobile calls it an MDA, Qtek sells it under its own name, and the customer walks away believing they bought an operator’s phone. That arrangement has made HTC a lot of money and left them with no brand at all.

If they put HTC on the front of this one, they pick a fight with the four companies that are currently their entire order book. Operators do not enjoy being reduced to a distribution channel, and they have obvious retaliation available: shelf placement, subsidy, and a call to any of the other Taiwanese ODMs who would happily take the volume. I would expect that retaliation to arrive fast and to hurt.

They should do it anyway. An ODM with no brand has no floor under its margins, because the only thing it can compete on is being cheaper than the next ODM, and there is always a next ODM. The Hermes is probably the best device HTC has ever built and it is the strongest hand they will hold for a while. Waiting for a safer moment to claim credit means waiting forever, and by then the operators will have trained an entire generation of buyers to believe the phone came from the network.

I have no idea what they will call it if they do. Whatever it is will be worse than Hermes.