In February I said the test of whether HTC’s rebrand was real would be whether it shipped something where the software was visibly its own work rather than Microsoft’s with a theme applied. The Touch is that thing, and it arrives in the same month as the device it is obviously responding to.
TouchFLO is a layer sitting on top of Windows Mobile that you drive with a finger. Drag upwards from the bottom of the screen and a cube rotates through three faces: contacts, media, applications. The targets are large. There is no stylus involved in any of it. For the first time, a Windows Mobile device has a surface that does not assume you are holding a plastic stick.
It is also a layer, and that is the whole limitation. Push past the three faces and you are in Windows Mobile, with the small targets and the nested menus and the stylus tucked into the side of the case because you will need it. HTC has built a lobby in front of somebody else’s building, and everything behind the lobby is unchanged.
I want to be fair about how hard the alternative would be. HTC cannot rewrite the operating system it licenses. What it can do is exactly what it has done, which is cover the paths customers walk most often and hope the rest is encountered rarely. That is a rational response to an impossible constraint and it is genuinely better than nothing.
The panel is the other compromise. This is a resistive screen, so a finger works but works imprecisely, and light touches do not register the way they do on the capacitive panel LG shipped in February. HTC has designed a finger interface and put it on hardware that would rather be poked. The gap between what the software wants and what the screen provides is noticeable within a minute.
So the position at the end of June is that three companies have now shipped finger-driven phones. LG built the right hardware and put the old software on it. HTC built the right software and put it on the old hardware. Apple built both and cannot let anybody else write anything for it.
That is a genuinely interesting standoff and I do not think it lasts long. The hardware question is settled by cost curves, and capacitive panels get cheap. The software question is settled by whoever is willing to throw away an operating system rather than decorate one, and the only company that has done that is the one that had nothing to throw away.
HTC deserves credit here. It identified the problem correctly, months before most of the industry admitted there was one, and it shipped the best answer available to a company that does not own its own platform. The uncomfortable conclusion is that not owning your platform is the problem, and no amount of good work on top of somebody else’s decisions gets around it.