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Interview: HTC's Horace Luke on the Hero

Posted by Joe Svetlik on Tue 14 Jul 2009

HTC talks design aesthetics to T3, writes Joe Svetlik.

T3 sat down with Horace Luke, the Chief Innovative Officer at HTC, to discuss HTC Sense, the new Hero handset, and the "slippery like a watermelon seed" iPhone.

 

T3: "What is HTC Sense?"

Horace Luke: "Sense is HTC’s design philosophy. We want the users to personalise the phones, to make them theirs. Just as your house is decorated differently to mine, we wanted each person’s phone to be unique to them. As well, we wanted to improve communication by making it people-centric, and add that wow factor, with things like turning the phone over to silent it if it’s ringing in a meeting."

 

T3: "How does it improve communication?"

Horace Luke: "There are so many ways to communicate, everyone has maybe three email accounts, SMS, Facebook…but with Hero just click a name to see all their correspondence. It’s the same as on the TouchDiamond 2, but we added Facebook and Flickr. Most phones are app-centric, but we’re content centric. We think it’s more important to bring people to the forefront of the device.

 

We wanted to do something different rather than copy the iPhone like everyone else, so we surveyed people. They said how clumsy their phones were, and we addressed that. People liked widgets but didn’t want to keep opening and closing them, as it makes for a horrible experience, so we introduced our new user interface."

 

T3: "What is Android like to work with?"

Horace Luke: "Android is very flexible. Windows Mobile was great with development tools, it can do lots of powerful things. But Android allows you to make changes from the top to the bottom layer. There are three classes of Android phone: the first was the Google-branded phones, the G1 and Magic; the Hero is the first in the second category, in which we added our own customised UI, but we didn’t change everything because they did some great things, like push email, integrating Google Maps etc; and the third is the quick and dirty Chinese knockoffs that won’t work with Marketplace. They’re Linux phones, really.

 

The hardware is only a small part of the user experience, the UI brings it alive. I can’t say whether we’ll be implementing the new UI on all Android phones already available, but we do want to bring it to as many devices as possible. But Hero is a very cool device, one of the best I’ve worked on. Once you’ve used it you can’t go back."

 

T3: "How did you get the look of the Hero?"

Horace Luke: "Everyone’s copying the iPhone, but we wanted Hero to look unique. A flat bar isn’t the best form factor to hold. The iPhone is slippery like a watermelon seed, so we used Teflon, as on pots and pans, to create grip, and the lip fits your face while lifting the screen to an angle to reduce glare. We want to make changes to benefit the users, not just differentiate for its own sake. We enlisted a San Francisco design company, who designed the Nike Triax watch and K2 snowboarding boots, to think about things differently. My theory is fun people build fun products. We celebrate controversy. Our CEO Peter Chou said to me “What hell are you doing?” when he first saw it, then he got it in his hand and he loved it."

 

 

Video: Hands-on with the HTC Hero

We get up close and personal with the best Android handset yet.

 - Click now to see the Hero in action