The HTC Roadmap for WinMo, and Android Answers

I managed to attend a presentation by someone at HTC this week, and a (small) amount of light was shed on some of their future plans. I'm pretty sure that between Engadget Mobile and Gizmodo (and the dozens of gadget sites they troll for information), this information already exists at least as rumor, but here is what I learned. My last phone, and my current one, are both made my HTC, and both run versions of Windows Mobile (aka WinMO or WM).

One of the first slides of the presentation was an overall roadmap (see above) - unfortunately, the road on that map ended with 2008. Still - there was interesting info! There are three roads on the map: one for 3G phones, one for "Edge PDA" phones, and one for "Smart Phones". The last one - smart phones - only has two devices on it, and only one "new" one - the HTC S740 (code-named "Rose"), a oddish-looking mobile phone running WM6.1 Standard (e.g., non-touchscreen), and yet with a slide-out qwerty keyboard (plus a "normal" numeric keypad below the screen) and the same CPU as the Diamond. I guess some people really hate on-screen keypads.

The "Edge PDA" road has what looks like modestly updated versions of the original HTC Touch. Same OMAP 201 MHz processor, but with slightly better cameras, and running WM6.0. *yawn* These were codenamed "Opal". An un-codenamed device for Q4 of this year (that's now, for those keeping track) seemed to be the HTC P3470, another 201 MHz OMAP processor phone running TouchFLO 2D, but with quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE instead of the tri-band in the Touch/Opal series. There's also a quad-band Touch with the same specs, but with the rounded Touch form-factor, giong by "Touch Viva". I don't know about you, but I'm so over the underpowered, 2.5G, low-rez screens of the entire pre-Diamond series of "Touch" phones.

Which is a nice segue to the top-row of the "roadmap" - the 3G phones. The Touch Diamond shows up around mid-year (and since I bought mine in June, that jives with reality), followed by the Raphael (aka Touch Pro), and then the Jade. The Touch Pro is pretty much a fatter Diamond, owing to its slide-out qwerty keyboard, and includes a TV-out and a micro-SD card slot. According to Slayo.com, the Jade combines 3G, and the same processor as the Diamond series (528 MHz Qualcomm) with the 240 x 320 screen of the 2.5G Touch phones. On a later slide, it's referred to as the "HTC Touch 3G", and confusingly labled as having "four times the resolution of most phones", which is the same line used on the Touch Diamond slide. So is it really 240 x 320, or is it 320 x 640? Hmm... Anyway, the form-factor is defintely more Touch than Diamond, though by no means ugly. It comes in a few different colors, including ivory and black.

After the Jade comes the Victor - another variant on the Touch Diamond, with the corners being more rounded, and a different back. This phone was passed around the presentation, but I didn't have a chance to take a photo (they're all over the web anyway). The G1 was nowhere on the roadmap, but the final phone in the 3G row was the HTC Blackstone. As revealed by Coolsmartphone.com, this is HTC Touch HD, which goes on sale here in Thailand next week (knocks on wood) with it's gorgeous 3.8" 480 x 800 screen - enough pixels to watch video ripped from DVDs in all their 1990s-rez glory.

The presentation had some charts, courtesy of IDC (and dated 2007.... doh!) that showed sales of "converged devices" growing at double-digit rates. Since HTC is one of the biggest (and fastest-growing) makers of these mobile communication devices (which is what I'm calling them - "smartphone" doesn't really do justice to what you can do with a good one), things look pretty good for them, at least in the world of bar-chart projections. They've got the largest WinMO R&D team on the planet (not sure if that includes Microsoft or not.... looking at how delayed WM7 is, though, I wouldn't be suprised if HTC has more WinMo developers than Microsoft), and with Android, they're covering their butts just in case!

HTC doesn't just make gadgets though - they offer enterprise solutions to carriers including putting in push-mail using either the CAMEO Enterprise Server (which can connect to Exchange, Lotus/Domino, and normal IMAP/POP3 servers) or by adding BlackBerry Connect software to their phones, so crackberry-addicts can get their fix from HTC hardware. Unbeknownst to me, HTC has enterprise software for vertical markets like mobile insurance, healthcare management, sales-force automation, and "mobile monitoring" for fleet management (read: keeping tabs on where your truck-drivers are). All of these other offerings explain part of why HTC is sticking with WinMo through thick and thin (lately, thin). These other software solutions were all designed to run on WinMo - hence, more WinMo h/w from HTC.

At the end of the presentation was Q&A time. I had about 50 questions in my head, but to be polite, I just asked two. The biggest one was, "Why is the G1/Dream hardware less impressive than the Touch HD and Touch Pro, which came out around the same time?" The answer was very, very interesting. I was told that "clearly, HTC wasn't responsible for the complete design" - and that given HTC's focus on making "stylish" phones, the sheer non-beauty of the G1 should make that obvious. Whether it was T-Mobile, or Google that was influencing the G1's less-than-Prada-level of style, I don't know. I do know that the G1 has a 320 x 480 screen, which is half that of the Touch Diamond, and even less than half of the almost-identical sized Touch HD's screen. The HTC rep told me that the "next generation" of Android phone, to be released next year, will bring the hardware up to parity with their WinMo sets, and will be more stylish.

Oh - for you guys over at the XDA-Developers.com forums, HTC is definitely keeping an eye on what you guys write about. I mentioned to the HTC rep that there were people working on getting Android to boot on Diamond/Touch Pro hardware, and was rewarded with a big smile, and the reply, "Oh, you mean the XDA Developer people? Yes, they've been playing with our hardware a lot" (or words to that effect).

2009 should see some new HTC Android hardware - to HTC, Android is more of a "consumer" mobile OS, while WinMo is more of an "Enterprise" OS, but as time goes on, I suspect Android is going to get a lot of "enterprise" features too. Oh - and thanks, HTC, for the free Touch Diamond slim-case and the gift-pack of car-charger/mobile-charger/retractable-sync-cable and screen protectors - that's exactly the kind of swag I needed!!!

Five Weeks with the HTC Touch Diamond

I've always loved gadgets, and PDAs and smartphones in particular. My first PDA was a Casio Z-7000 "Zoomer", followed by my first WinMo device, the Cassiopia E-11, then the Ipaq 3650.

I was always a fan of the idea of "convergence" - having a single gadget to do both phone, and PDA functions. As the years went by, my original Ipaq was replaced by a series of PDAs; my last dedicated non-phone PDA was the iPaq 1910. Then, I bought the ill-fated Axia A108, and finally an HTC Star Trek (aka Dopod S300 or Qtek 8500) smartphone.

When the iPhone came out, I was sorely tempted to get one, but wanted to test-drive it a bit first. So I did the next best thing - I bought one for my wife! It's a great phone, and a great PDA (with some real limitations), but it's just a little too big to carry around in my pants pocket. So after I went swimming with my "Star Trek" (by accident, I swear) in June, I bought the new HTC Touch Diamond.

The Diamond has been reviewed in a lot of places, ranging from CNet, to Engadget, to Gizmodo. But one thing most of the reviews don't mention is what version of the ROM they're using, and that has a huge impact on the Diamond's usability. Huge!

First things first - you can find the detailed specs on HTC's latest marvel on their site, but in brief, It sports:

• An ARM-based CPU running @ 528 MHz
  
• 192 MB of RAM (112 MB for running apps, and 82MB for program storage)
  
• 4 GB of on-board flash storage mounted as a sort of "non-removable card"
• A gorgeous 640x480 (VGA) touch-screen which is 2.8" diagonally. The screen is so sharp, it's like looking at a glossy color magazine page.
• A-GPS (assisted GPS, meaning the phone can take advantge of downloaded data to improve precision and speed, supposedly)
• Bluetooth 2.0, supporting A2D2, Personal Area Networks (PANs), etc.
• WiFi (802.11b), useful for fast connections in places that don't have 3G yet. You know, countries where the bureaucracy is a morass of slow, corrupt and inept officials... *cough*
• Tri-band 3G inclusing HSDPA and UMTS. The bands you can use depend on which version you get (USA vs. rest of the planet).
  

About the ROM....
When I got my new HTC in June, it shippped with ROM version 1.34. Being a fan of the xda-developers forum, I already knew this rom was allegedly a sluggish lemon, and it lived up to this fame pretty well. Luckily, somebody had posted the 1.37 version of the rom to rapidshare, so I rapidly upgraded my phone. Two weeks ago I upgraded to the 1.93 rom, which enables the 850 MHz band (useless to me in Bangkok) and some other tweaks which were nice.

Things I like:

• The screen is beautiful, and makes reading RSS feeds and everything else really easy on the eyes.
• 4 GB of storage is plenty for me. Some people fill up their 16 GB iPhones with video, and music, etc. I doubt I own more than 1.5 GB of music in total, and I can't really see myself watching a lot of video on a 2.8" screen.
• With the latest rom, HTC's custom interface (called TouchFLO 3D) that sits atop the aging and honestly fugly Windows Mobile 6.1 UI, is smooth and fast. No more occasional lags, and the home-screen shows instantly without any delay.
• The camera is really nice. It's 3.2 MP, auto-focus, takes the best photos of any phone I've owned (including my wife's iPhone), as well as video.
  
• TouchFLO 3D - I already mentioned it, but once you finish training your brain to use it instinctively, it's nice. Not iPhone amazing nice, but nice.
  

Things that kinda suck:

• TouchFLO 3D doesn't go far enough in hiding Windows Mobile. I like WinMo, from a developer's point of view. When you're using the Touch Diamond, and go to edit a contact - which drops you into the standard face-only-Microsoft-could-love mode, you realize how nice TouchFLO 3D is. Please, please HTC, come out with an update hides ever more of the beast beneath the covers.
• The GPS on my Diamond is slow to lock onto satellites, even outside. Some people's units are apparently faster, but mine isn't. It's okay, since for a quick view of where I am, Google Map's "My Location" is fast and accurate enough, but it's sort of annoying when I do want to use it.
• The capacitive-touch scroll/spin-while works for some apps, and not for others. Why? I don't know.
• Some of the default settings are annoying and need to be tweaked. The height of the "compose" window when tapping out an SMS is too short, for instance. Also, the phone doesn't turn on receiving an SMS, it just slowly pulses a circular light, like some sort of white-light cylon. You can address these tweaks by looking thru the xda forums for the Diamond.
  

Messaging
I have both an IMAP email account and a Zimbra server set up on my phone. The Zimbra server support ActiveSync (which thinks the Zimbra is Exchange), and using the on-screen keyboard isn't bad once you're used to it. You can also use the graffiti-esque block-recognizer, or transcriber, if you're into that.

Web-browsing
Now, when I bought the phone, the Thai government and newspapers were all still claiming that AIS, one of the biggest carriers here, would have 3G coverage in Bangkok by July. Having lived in Thailand a few years, I figured that meant "end of the year, maybe" and so far, still no 3G in the city. Supposedly there's a small 3G experimental network up in Chiang Mai, but I'm not flying up there just to see what I can't get in Bangkok yet. To be honest, with EDGE speeds around 200 Kbps, and with TRUE blanketing downtown with Wi-fi hotspots, not having any 3G for my 3G phone stings less (but still - c'mon you guys, frack'en get on with it and settle the stupid licensing issue!!)

Summing it up
So if you're looking to buy a small, well-built - i've dropped it TWICE, once on the BTS platform, and no damage! - touch-screen phone, and you want something smaller, lighter and (dare I say it, less conformist) than the iPhone, the HTC Touch Diamond is a nice device. Not perfect - but nice.

I finally have real convergence - the Diamond even has a stylus, which you almost never need since TouchFLO is finger-usable. Just make sure you upgrade to the newest rom - anything below 1.37 is a stinker.