The rise of the touchscreen smartphones

Today’s release of the HTC Fuze rounds out the latest generation of touchscreen oriented smartphones, with entries now from Windows Mobile, Google Android, RIM (with the forthcoming Storm) and, of course, Apple. This is actually a pretty significant milestone. To me, what this means is that the idea of a touchscreen device that still has pretty reasonable typing capabilities is no longer just a niche curiosity. Every vendor offering smartphones now has them.

I believe that this will both drive the prevalence of smartphones that can retrieve, store, and create significant volumes information (from backend systems and creating them and modifying them on the device) will accelerate smartphone usage in the enterprise and also drive broader consumer usage of smartphones for more than just web and email.

The challenge of course for developers is how they create these applications, similar to the applications being released for just iPhone on the App Store for all of these other compelling device operating systems. Writing to four different operating systems in four different languages is of course not really a practical option. This is of course where Rhomobile comes in: write your app once using primarily HTML template to create your UI and it runs on all of these cool new phones.