I deal with Samsung phones quite a bit and have access to their phones anywhere from 4-6 months before launch, and I can say without hesitation that no one — not Samsung, not WinMo, not Moto Blur — can come close to HTC’s implementation of Sense on the Hero.

Not only are HTC’s Sense Android widgets beautiful, they’re much more functional than their standard Android brethren. Sense is the real deal. The integration simply works. I cannot wait to see what HTC does with 1.6 (the Hero currently runs 1.5), and 2.0.

The sad thing is, I’m getting greedy after only a week. I want more pretty HTC widgets. I want more home screens (seven isn’t enough!). I want a faster processor. I want a larger screen.

I’m hooked on HTC’s Sense, and as long as they keep stepping up they’re game, I’ll stay with them and upgrade phones ’til I’m broke. Like I said, Sense is the real deal.

For now, the short answer would be: the power and money in these things (components, hardware/integrated systems/software/services) is always shifting. (re: Clayton Christensen). One part gains an upper hand and makes boatloads of money, then standardization and commoditization comes along, and then the real money and innovation moves to the next level and back. We saw it happen in PC and across tons of other industries.

Now the hot thing is cloud services and mobile. Whoever figures it out…

So, instead of having a distribution of platforms across the traditional players (say MS, Apple, Google), we will have a different distribution across hardware manufacturers. Is this sustainable in the long run?

The reason I am asking is the following: A cross-platform layer is basically extra resources that someone has to commit in order to build it. Why would consumers pay for such an extra layer? Viewing the same question from a slightly different angle, imagine the following scenario: one day MS decides to produce its own device. MS doesn’t have to bother about cross-platform layers hence it can do more things with fewer resources. Wouldn’t that give MS a huge competitive advantage over the cross-platform players? Isn’t this basically the advantage that Apple now enjoys over them as well?

Re: vertical integration. Yes. They will have to. And Nokia is again ahead of the pack. They are already doing it for 2 years with OVI (How successfully, that’s another topic). Samsung is also starting now ( TouchWiz, Movie store, app store). No one else (in mobile, I’m not talking about Apple or Google), yet, has a clue. Well, Motorola might.

About Apple and Palm. Well, Apple may have a shot, but they are too closed and self focused to become anything more then a big niche player, at least until Steve Jobs is in charge. And Palm, for now, is just too small to pull it off.

Getting back to vertical integration, why do you think Nokia just got in bed with Microsoft, the main competitor in their smartphone biz very recently? It’s because they see Google as the main threat in the years to come.

Some interesting years ahead of us, and I have no idea how it will end up in 2015. Nokia vs Samsung in mobile devices, Google vs Nokia vs Samsung vs Apple in mobility services… Then all these possible wildcards…

I’m just lucky to be watching it from a second row :)

Also, if an abstraction layer is “abstract enough”, wouldn’t that mean that companies like Samsung and HTC would have to become much more vertically integrated and start resembling much more the likes of Apple and Palm?

P.S. I have a comment though regarding the waste of computing resources. I think that it may have become irrelevant in the world of desktop computing (although the wide resent towards vista indicates otherwise…) but I think it will remain a hard constraint in the world of mobile computing for quite some time. Not just because of processor constraints but mainly because of battery constraints. We’ll see…

“Is the skin-based, or platform-on-top-of-platforms approach in mobile computing going to give people more effective means/tools to develop apps? Or is such an approach a waste of resources (even computing resources on a device…) that cannot be sustained in the long run? Why didn’t we see a widespread adoption of such strategies in desktop computing?”

Yes, IMHO, an abstraction layer above the OS, that let’s the developer interact with all the capabilities of the mobile device, just like the native apps do now, is where all this stuff is going to end up. Skins, Web runtimes, widgets, etc; are just the start.

And computing resources are part of the equation.

Not so long ago, even devices like current smartphones where impossible. Because the resources available just wouldn’t support that, everything had to be written in machine language. It is still the case for a cheap feature phones running native OS’es like S30, S40 from Nokia, and similar stuff from others.

But, thank’s to Moore’s law, we already have the smartphones that allow SDK’s and third party apps to work without a hitch on mobile devices.

And, I don’t remember who, but someone early in a personal computing days said something like “Don’t be afraid to waste computing cycles”, or something like that. Well, that now applies to mobiles as well.

There were tons of different computing platforms in PCs in the beginning. Apple, IBM PC, Atari, Commodore and probably tens more, which, with the ever exponentially increasing computing power might have led us to that same abstraction layer…

The main reason, IMHO, we ended up in PCs the way we have, was because nobody understood the stakes, cared and was watching. Except for Bill Gates,who by luck or genius, came in and standardized everything on DOS and then Windows.

Well, everyone now knows the stakes in this, and everyone is watching. So nobody (operators, vendors, regulators) will allow anyone in mobile to get to such a dominant position as we have in PC world.

But, on the other hand, it will be too difficult for an app developer to make his app work through a widely fragmented ecosystem of platforms.

So, eventually, we will end up with abstraction layer, that works on top of multiple platforms, and allows apps to do all the things we expect from the native app today.

Whether this will be one layer, like a collection of HTML/JavaScript/XML/CSS/etc; for the Web, or something more fragmented, I have no idea.

But, I am sure, that the native OS apps, are just a stop gap.

Since none of us knows whether the hd2 will provide us with a lag-free gesture-based experience, lets concentrate on my initial question. Is the skin-based, or platform-on-top-of-platforms approach in mobile computing going to give people more effective means/tools to develop apps? Or is such an approach a waste of resources (even computing resources on a device…) that cannot be sustained in the long run? Why didn’t we see a widespread adoption of such strategies in desktop computing? Just a question…

Anyway what you’re describing sounds like it has more to do with the capacitive screen than the software running slowly on the hardware. Who knows why that happened to her but I haven’t seen it happen in any other video I’ve seen. Are you seriously claiming that a device suffers from terrible lag based on one brief moment in a short video?

I don’t think there’s another phone available at the moment that can rotate as quickly as that.

Every iPhone app will look good and use the standard iPhone controls in the main, whereas there are many WinMo apps out there that look like utter ick but work quite well. The experience will never be graphically uniform until GUI design standards are enforced and encouraged.

I like WinMo myself when you layer HTC Sense on top of it, and the HTC Sense portion of it really is a pleasure to use, but third party apps still clash mightily with the look and feel on my device.