Jason Oakley : The life of an Aussie geek!

In Australia, the telecommunications company Telstra has had an exclusive launch of the HTC Desire – a smartphone running the Android OS 2.1.

The HTC Desire is a nice phone. It’s designed and feels better than the HTC Magic — which feels more like a toy, particularly with it’s stock-standard interface.

The HTC Sense interface is very slick and almost iPhone-y like.  It supports pinching and multitouch gestures and several pages of icons and widgets to flick through.  The Android Marketplace has many widgets which can be downloaded and installed to add extra functionality to the “Home screens”.

The Desire seems very responsive — no doubt thanks to the 1GHz processor inside which is almost twice the speed of the iPhone.

A look through the Android Marketplace finds a lot to be Desire-d (pun intended).  There’s just not a lot of unique nor interesting apps to download.  The iPhone’s motto is “There’s an app for that!”. The Android motto may as well be “There’s no app for that … at this stage, but one day there might be”.

It’s no secret the Android Operating System is finally starting to take off in regards to purchases and installation on a myriad of phones, mostly from HTC.  There’s the Droid, Eris, Desire, Ally, Magic, Legend, Wildfire, Tattoo, Hero, Nexus One… among many others. Also a number have been announced, along with tablet devices.

One possible flaw with this is too many choices.  It’s nice that there’s a lot of options, if you want them.  However, the number of choices and configurations available for the Android make it seem to start to become fragmented like the Linux Operating System it runs on.  There’s so many flavours of Linux that Baskin Robbins would turn over in their grave.  A definite issue is the number of different versions of the Android OS installed on all of these devices.  Mostly: Android 1.5, 1.6, 2.0 & 2.1 with 2.2 on its way.  The different API calls, screen resolutions and options supported can be annoying for developers.

But, I digress. This is a mere sidetrack in regards to the OS and not at all specific to the actual device in question.

As I mentioned earlier, the HTC Desire is exclusive to Telstra for a few months.  I see one snag with this device and Android devices in Australia, in general.

Apple is a well-known company. It’s brand is unmistakably popular and in fact has a lot of very dedicated followers (known as “Apple fanbois”).  Apple makes a very small number of smartphones: The 2G, the 3G and the 3GS.  You can lump the new iPad into that as it almost functions similarly and, of course, the new iPhone 4G which everyone pretty well knows is definitely being released around July 2010.

Apple is a smart company and have had much experience with marketing.  In the USA, the television stations have many advertisements for their devices — paid for by Apple.  The iPhone is mentioned in every tech blog internationally and in many other places as well.   Places not just for geeks.

Now, let’s take the HTC Desire.  Who in Australia knows it exists?  Tech geeks, for one.  And… sadly, that’s about it.  The Desire has been released in Europe and Australia with a later release date in July this year for the USA and Canada.

My questions are: Who advertises this? Who promotes it? How will Joe Public even know it exists, let alone want one?  The unfortunate answer is: Nobody advertises it and hence only tech geeks will really want it.

Telstra Australia does not advertise mobile devices on television nor in most other mediums.  Sure, if you do a search for HTC or Desire in Google Australia, you will most certainly see advertisements about the “Telstra HTC Desire” in the Google Adwords, but other than that?

I listen to podcasts every day and I’ve heard about The Droid being advertised on USA television.  I’ve heard about “Sprint ads” and “Verizon ads” talking up the HTC Evo and the HTC Incredible, among others.  People there will know there’s a new phone on the block.  In Australia, I guarantee there will be no promoting in public media for the HTC Desire.  Most people will not know it exists.  They don’t care about what OS it will be running. They don’t care if Apple’s OS is locked down “tighter than a duck’s behind”.  All they know is, their friends have an Apple iPhone and it’d be really cool if they did too.

Apple assails our television show breaks with ads about what the iPhone can do. There’s ads about different apps, promoting the heck out of them.  They also show that it’s a popular phone and we’ve seen what it can do.

I will go so far as to say that most of the Australian public will never hear of the HTC Desire and few would care if they did. They are not interested that Android is open. They are not interested that it has a higher resolution, faster CPU and they can install whatever the heck they want.

The only way the HTC Desire (or any other Android OS phone or device) will sell as well as the iPhone is if it’s marketed.  I don’t know of any Android devices which are.

It’s nice that Telstra have decided to have an exclusive hold on the HTC Desire. They dream it to be an iPhone-killer and a wonderful option for people who are sick of their gaoled (jailed) iPhone and want something new and funky.  However, thanks to leaks we already know there’s a newer and better iPhone on the way. And you know what? It will sell extremely well and Joe Public will want one.  Why? Because he’s heard of it and so have all of his friends.