Windows Competing in the Smartphone Market
A recent addition to the small but growing family of Windows Phone 7 smartphones is the HTC 7 Pro, a mid-range phone with a physical keyboard. This may be one of a few make or break devices for Windows Phone 7 which so far has struggled to catch on with consumers. The HTC 7 Pro is in a very similar position to the Droid by Motorola which was released for Android in 2009 when Android was still a comparatively small part of the market. It proved to be a very popular phone and helped drive the increase in Android users, it remains to be seen if the HTC 7 Pro can do this for Windows Phone 7.
Touchscreens took a while to catch on for mobile phones, with the earliest phones featuring a purely touch interface dating back as far as 2000 for mobiles and as early as 1984 for an Apple landline concept phone. Arguably the form did not really catch on until the release of Apple’s defining iPhone in 2007 which created the modern smartphone package as most consumers understand them. Until this time mobile phones had physical keypads, most with a number pad and multiple presses to write letters for texts, then devices such as the Blackberry organisers and phones appeared for business users with physical keyboards resembling tiny versions of the standard desktop QWERTY interface.
The HTC 7 Pro smartphones are aimed at business users to whom a physical keyboard is an appealing feature allowing speedier and more accurate input of text for emails and texts. It will also be well match with Windows Phone 7′s support for Outlook, the email platform that many businesses will already be using. Sadly this vision has been poorly supported with what is now outdated hardware. The HTC 7 has a single core running at 1 GHz, far behind the dual cores now available on many smartphones and tablets. It has 576 megabytes of memory and 8 gigabytes of storage along with a 5 megapixel camera and a small, 3.6 inch 480 by 800 pixel screen. All of these features place it firmly in the previous generation of hardware and far behind the rumoured features of the upcoming next generation iPhone.
Fortunately for the HTC 7 the keyboard is a strong and positive selling point which will appeal to users who prefer a physical keyboard and those who need to do a lot of typing on their phone. The tilting feature that alllows the user to angle the screen as they wish rather like a laptop or netbook is also impressive and useful.
Sadly like all physical keyboard phones the downside of the sliding keyboard is all too apparent- the phone weighs 185 grams and is 16 mm thick, compare this with the Samsung Galaxy S II, a far more powerful touchscreen phone, at 116 grams and 8.9mm thick and the disadvantage is all too clear with a phone that is nearly twice the size while far less powerful. The price tag of the HTC 7 is also extremely high for its specifications at 430 for a sim-free and carrier unlocked phone or contracts with the phone for free starting at 30 per month. This represents a significant premium for a physical keyboard.
By contrast touchscreen smartphones are lighter, smaller and tend to have more elegant and attractive designs such as the Apple iPhone series. The latest technology also comes out in touchscreen-only form before making its way into smartphones with physical keyboards leaving those users behind the technology curve. Physical keyboards are increasingly a thing of the past with future designs heading toward pure touch interfaces. It is rumoured that the next iPhone will have only a single main physical button below the screen and everything else will be entirely touch driven with other manufacturers likely to follow suit.
The sole advantage of physical keyboards which had been more accurate and faster text entry is also being eroded rapidly or even entirely passed by as capacitive touchscreens grow more responsive and new methods of text input are devised. Two of these methods are Swype, a finger dragging interface where the user joins up the letters of the word they want in a single motion and Swiftkey, an advanced and learning predictive text program which usually only requires the user enter a few letters before it suggests the intended word for you. Both of these have lead to far faster and more accurate text entry via a touchscreen interface.
It seems likely that there will be fewer and fewer smartphones with physical keyboards released as the designs achievable with touchscreens are so much more elegant and the physical keyboards are often too small to be a truly useful keyboard as would be found on a portable device like a netbook. The HTC 7 smartphones may prove important in attracting business customers and others to Windows Phone 7 but it’s not the ideal design to do so as it lags poorly behind its touchscreen competition on price and specifications.
To find out more about Windows 7 phones like the HTC 7 Pro or the Samsung Omnia 7 visit www.expansys.com.
June 5, 2011 | Posted by Edmund Clare
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