1. I don’t think skinning is dead and what HTC and Samsung did with Sense and TouchWiz went way beyond simple skinning anyway. As hardware manufacturers increasing look to establish brand for product differentiation, I expect them to increase pressure on OS suppliers to allow them to do so.

2. Nokia has an abysmal smartphone track record in the US. I suspect that they are delaying introduction of WP7 phones in the US to first gather momentum in their tradition strongholds. Nokia must first prove they can actually sell smartphones in the US before they’re a serious threat to HTC.

3. HTC hardware running WebOS is an interesting idea. (If you check back I was the first to call the HP acquisition of Palm in the GigaOM blog comments.) Better yet, how about an HP HTC team up which gives HTC the rights to use and update WebOS. If HP is going to stay in the PC hardware game, they’ll need smartphones in their product mix. HTC is just the company to provide those phones.

I don’t know if Sense was ever really a differentiator though. Does you typical walk-into-the-store customer really pay attention to the user interface enough to know that this one’s Sense, that’s Touchwiz, etc?

Re WebOS – yes, this would help, but it would require HTC to do something different and be creative. They’d need to start doing what Apple does and think deeply about what the mobile experience should be or else they’ll simply copy trends which gives them the downside of being a follower without the upside of setting their own path.

Right – Apple has something unique. If you want an iPhone you have one choice. Same for Macs.

Now look at commodity PCs and Android handsets. To the typical smartphone customer or PC customer the hardware vendor brings relatively little differentiation. For most people the incessant buzz of new releases means nothing. People just don’t keep up on the various names of the various HTC handsets so they don’t really think about whether they have the HTC UBER, UBER Plus, Rhyme, Reason or whatever (names, rather obviously, made up). People only care about what’s out when they go to buy one. They decide on what to get based on some obvious things like screen size, etc, then they ignore the buzz of releases for another 2 years.

We’ve seen this before… this is the Wintel story again where for the most part hardware vendors are interchangeable and where they race to the bottom in terms of margin because they can only really differentiate on price. That usually leads to cost cutting which leads to skimping on build quality, etc. Seen this movie before…