HTC put four new Windows Mobile devices on the table at CTIA last month and the one worth talking about is the one where a feature got quietly removed before shipping.
The S620, which spent its development life as Excalibur, was supposed to have a touch strip running down the side of the screen. Run a fingertip along it, scroll through your message. It is not there on the shipping device. In its place are touch sensitive volume keys, and HTC’s explanation, to their credit given they did not have to say anything at all, is that the first version did not work as well as they hoped.
I find that more encouraging than the phones themselves. A company willing to cut a headline feature between prototype and production because it is not good enough is a company with a functioning quality gate, and in this industry that is rarer than it should be. Plenty of vendors would have shipped the strip, let reviewers discover it was unreliable, and quietly fixed it in the successor.
What it also tells you is where HTC’s head is. They keep trying to get rid of the stylus, and they keep not quite managing it. The whole Windows Mobile Pocket PC line is built around a plastic stick you lose, and everybody who makes these devices knows the stick is why normal people will not touch them, and nobody has yet produced an input method good enough to remove it. The touch strip was an attempt. The trackball and scroll wheel on the P3300 is another attempt at the same problem from a different angle.
They are going to keep failing at this for a while, and they are still right to keep going. Resistive screens need pressure, which means they need something hard and pointed, which means the stylus survives. Getting rid of it properly is not an interface design problem, it is a sensor problem, and HTC does not build the sensors.
Meanwhile the actual volume this autumn goes through Cingular, who are taking the TyTN as the 8525 with a rounder shell and, from what I can tell, without the video calling camera. That is the arrangement working exactly as it always has: HTC does the engineering, an operator puts its number on the front, and the customer never learns whose device they bought. The 8525 will outsell everything HTC ships under its own name this year by a distance, which rather undercuts the branding push they started in June.
The successor to the Hermes is already being talked about in the usual places, and I am not going to pretend I know what it is. What I would want from it is not a faster processor. It is a screen you can use with a thumb.