HTC Hero - The iPhone Killer

It’s here, and it is exactly what people were suspecting. World, meet the true iPhone killer!

Before we get started, it is worth mentioning that I am an iPhone owner and I love the device. But HTC Hero is a device that cannot be ignored.

So, this is the HTC Hero, a new device that has so much going for it that as a mobile platform all of its early moves are in the right bleeding edge directions. For example:

• It uses the new(ish) Google mobile operating system, Android.
  That’s right… it isn’t Apple, it isn’t Palm, it isn’t Windows Mobile and it isn’t Blackberry. It is a mobile operating system built buy the same folks who are currently taking over the web! Probably going to be a mobile OS killer.
  
• It uses multitouch.
  If you don’t know what multitouch is, then go get your hands on an iPhone. The geniuses over at Apple created (to the best of my knowledge) the concept where you can pinch or push the mobile device screen with two (or more) fingers to zoom in or out, rotate something, or drag a number of items. From what I have heard I am not certain that the HTC Hero can do all of the multitouch stuff that the iPhone can do, but the fact is that most apps out there are currently only using multitouch in two-finger mode so HTC Hero will seem comparable. Not killer, but if people implement more than two finger multitouch apps, it gets killer fast.
• It implements the Adobe Flashlite Player.
  This means Adobe player 9 targeting ActionScript 2 at the moment. But Adobe seems committed to getting the full Flash 10 player optimized and available for a slew of mobile devices in the coming months. Flashlite is, however, a great start! At the moment Apple seems deadest on not allowing the Flash player (in any form) onto the iPhone platform. They are full of excuses while Adobe seems willing to work through anything. This could be the downfall of the iPhone. Ubber-killer move.
• It can run apps concurrently.
  At the moment the iPhone only allows certain features and apps (mostly Apple apps) to run at the same time as other apps on the device. For example, on the iPhone you can be on a call while looking through your contacts, you can listen to music while checking facebook, and you can get a push notification of a friend attempting to contact you on AIM Instant messenger while on the home screen. But, if you want to start a web search and then go start some music and head over to the check the weather forecast, and make a move in an online chess game, well, half of those apps stop if you leave their screens, which means your search is on hold until you load the browser again. Not so with the HTC Hero. It can run multiple applications all at the same time. Not just a killer move, an Ender move.

With Adobe and Google driving forward with these amazing technologies, Apple will soon find itself left behind quickly if it doesn’t get the Flash player running on the iPhone. Here is why.

At the moment if someone builds an application for the iPhone they are specifically targeting the iPhone market. And building iPhone apps means embracing a fairly Mac specific programming language, set of tools, as well as a slightly tweaked development methodology. This is a great way to build a base of dedicated developers because once they hone these skills they aren’t likely to run off and target another platform with their skills, mostly because they can’t do it.

With Flash and ActionScript, you have a completely different paradigm. If you build a flash application for the HTC Hero, you can easily port that work to run on, say, any Windows Mobile device since Flash is always installed on Windows Mobile Devices. And if you want to create a version that runs from the web, well that is simple enough because Flash was built for the web. So the Flash and ActionScript developer can market to many different devices including the HTC Hero which will provide a similar but possibly more flexible experience than the iPhone.

The one risk that exists for HTC Hero Flash Developers that does not exist for iPhone developers is the monetization scheme. Right now, if you are an iPhone developer, your application has a predefined path for sales. Basically, you have to sell your iPhone app through the Apple App Store where Apple takes its 30% cut and your app competes with 75,000 other apps in the iPhone marketplace (at the time of this writing.) To my knowledge I am not aware of an HTC Hero app store and if there is a store, does that include the sale of Flash-based applications for the HTC Hero. All of the Flash examples I have seen so far on the HTC Hero are running from the HTC Hero browser as opposed to a purchased FlashLite application that was installed to the device independent of a browser. So I have to do more research on how to make money building Flashlite applications. But it is worth knowing that Microsoft (which implements Flash player in their Mobile OS) has launched an app store and there are other app stores for android that currently already exist. So it is a matter of time before the Google Android market has a fully saleable store selling Flash apps for the device. The likely key difference between Google Android application sales and iPhone application sales would be that HTC Hero users will be able to buy apps from a number of sources (which means HTC Hero Flash Developers can sell their apps from a number of stores) while iPhone users will still only be able to buy apps from the Apple App Store.

Stuff to watch for:

Full Flash player on Android Devices. Adobe is committed to tweaking the performance of Flash Player version 10 (the current player) so this goes for any device that currently implements FlashLite on mobile devices, and could include Flash player 10 for the iPhone (Steve Jobs himself implies that while they have seen a version of the Flash player run on the iPhone they won’t release it because it doesn’t perform well enough.) Adobe seems committed to getting the full version 10 player on mobile devices.

Flash App Store likely partly partnering with if not owned by Adobe. Since the Flashlite application market is not owned by a single app sales store it wouldn’t surprise me if Adobe sees the need to help foster a Flash community-driven app store to help build more momentum for open devices like HTC Hero. This is a fairly important step in the roadmap to success.

Adobe AIR Applications adopting the Mobile Device platforms. Adobe AIR wraps web and Flash technology allowing it to act like an installable application. While this technology is fairly young, it has turned quite a few web developers into application developers. Intriguingly, Adobe AIR applications can run on Windows, Mac and now Linux. This means you write the app once and it runs (can be sold) for any of those kinds of computers. Watch for Adobe AIR for the various Mobile Platforms: Windows Mobile and Android first, more than likely, then possibly Palm and Blackberry and taking up the rear iPhone (but not likely any time too soon for Apple.)

Learning In an Industry That Never Sleeps

I hate computers. Actually, I really like computers and I hate that fact, because they are like these sense-less infants with insatiable appetites for knowledge and mobility. You can feed them all day long and into the night and they never stop growing. In fact, if you feed a baby it only ever has two arms at most with which to wield havoc on your life (though I know parents who might want to disagree with that.) But with a computer, you feed it and feed it and the next day it has ten arms reaching in every direction. This baby is no typical baby. And once your friends and family (and employer) catch a glimpse of this amazing baby they want to see it do trick and want you to raise one up for them, too. Pretty soon you find that you are doing all that you can to keep up with this monster of a baby as the world around you begs to see more tricks.

Like parents of human babies, you begin to realize that it takes far more than 9 to 5 to keep up with this toddler. You can’t sedate it or pawn it off on relatives or a sitter. Every day it is growing out of control and within a few days you catch yourself saying, “Where did that new appendage come from?” and now you have to quickly “master” the abilities of this growing baby, so you can remain the respectable teacher of it.

My baby’s most recent new appendages are PHP, Ajax, WPF/E, XAML, and SharePoint. I see these suckers reaching and grabbing and throwing and warbling every day. There are a countless number of fingers reaching everything within the grasp of my available time.
So I have decided to cut back. I am cutting back on sleep, personal time and most importantly anything else that may have critical importance to my life or career, as I get completely absorbed and enveloped in the weeds of this gigantic organic/dynamic playground. I have been trying to cut out frivolous stuff like eating and time in the bathroom (two things that are like a perpetual cycle unto each other) to make more time for baby, but I find I am getting weak fast, so I have to get back on the trough.

Back to Reality: I would give anything for this silent competitively growing tech-revolution to plane off and give the proverbial “parents” a little break, but I don’t see that happening. The fact is that we are on the very early upward trend of a massive technology parabola that only just started in the very late 1970s. Soon, meaning in my lifetime, there will be a nearly vertical adoption curve of growth and change around how we think about and live with technology (from the inevitable evaporation of the cube sitting on the floor called a computer – it will be completely integrated into other products and not be an end in itself, to the ways we interact with the request and delivery of information- no more keyboards, mice and monitors, but something altogether more intuitively integrated) and we will need new technology just to keep track of the old technology that just became outdated.

So, here is my prediction: Wetware is what is next. In 1997 I imagined I invented the term when I found myself thinking about the future interface between human biology and digital appendages. I think we will see the creation of wetware products that will help deliver stored and indexed information to us in a faster more intuitive manner. It will be like a Bluetooth device that attaches to our glasses and displays information related to as many human interactions as possible, automatically cross-referencing and indexing information in their contexts at an incredible rate. Kids will wear this stuff their entire lives and when they get old, everything they ever experienced will be available at their fingertips, sorted by statistical relevance by the age in which they found and reflected on it. Gone will be the days of getting old and forgetting stuff. Our “brain” will be managed externally. And big brother will pay big bucks to get a peak at your bit-matter ( not quite grey-matter.) Companies will specialize in helping sift through your digital preferences and help you articulate your opinion better than you could ever do. In fact, you won’t have to show up at the hardware store and ask for “one of those puddy slash tapey things that help the pipe stop leaking.” Your wetware will cross-reference “puddy-slash-tapey, pipe,leaking” with the product catalog of the store you walked into and ask for the right product by name, on your behalf. Business Intelligence will take on a whole new meaning and Marketing will be reduced to intense logarithmic calculations about the probability of your interest in their product rather than blanketing you with a shotgun blast of eye candy to try and get you to buy their products. This is how advertising dollars will be saved. You will volunteer your statistical interest via wetware, without you even knowing it, and the ad will move along to a slightly more likely candidate. Our time will be focused on things that seem to add value while the rest of the digital planet rolls forward on the boring details that we would never have even attempted to collate on our own.

Next blog entry: "How we will survive an energy crisis in the future when we let technology manage our preferences" or "How to grill a ham sandwhich"