I’ve long theorised that it isn’t just top-end, touchscreen smartphones that capture the imagination of the general public. Nope, according to my exhaustive research (which amounts to “looking at what posts on here people have commented most on”), I reckon it’s entry-level touchscreen phones. As I said in a previous blog post, phones that give people access to a touchscreen on the cheap are where it’s at.
And that brings us neatly onto the topic of today’s blog post, because it appears I’m not the only person to realise that.
According to MobiFrance (Google-translated link, expect some… interesting grammar), yet another manufacturer has decided to release a touchscreen feature phone, to grab a piece of that mass market. What’s intriguing this time is who it is, because, well, it’s HTC. This is a rather intriguing development, because if there’s one thing HTC have got a reputation for, it’s making chuffin’ nice touchscreen phones. The other interesting bit is that it is a feature phone, and not a smartphone. And that means that, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first non-smartphone HTC have ever, ever made (as far as I know, anyway… if anyone can think of one I’ve forgotten, then correct me in the comments).
Combine those two facts together, and you get the HTC Touch.B, a phone which I find to be incredibly exciting, and when you think about it, the reason should be obvious. Yes, folks, what we’ve got here is a cheap (assuming they don’t price it too highly… more on that in a second), entry-level touchscreen phone, that’s made by the people who invented the Sense and TouchFLO 3D interfaces. Think about that. Think about how awesome those interfaces are. Now think about a cheap phone that’s got an interface by the same people…
Of course, it ain’t going to be running on Windows Mobile (like the awesome HTC HD2) or Android (like the HTC Hero), so what is it going to be running on? Qualcomm’s “Brew” platform, apparently. Whatever that is. All I know is that it’s got full Flash support. And given that it’s HTC making it, you can guarantee they’ve fiddled about with the UI. Here, have a look, and see the UI in action for yourself:
Okay, granted, it looks a tiny little bit basic, but crucially, it also looks to be fast, responsive, intuitive and very, very finger-friendly…
I’ll be honest, I can see this being a massive, massive hit for HTC. The only downside, at the moment, is that there are two things we don’t know about the HTC Touch.B; the first is whether it’ll get released in the UK, but since the video is from MobiFRANCE (emphasis on the France), I would assume what we were seeing there is a GSM phone, which means there’s no reason it shouldn’t get a UK release.
The other factor we don’t yet know is price. And that’s going to be the crucial bit, since I reckon half the reason phones like the Samsung Genio are so popular is because they’re dirt cheap. However, if HTC get the price right, I reckon we could have a new superstar on our hands here…
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