Inside One & Co’s brightly lit San Francisco office, Scott Croyle points out the products that he and his team have had a hand in designing. The items line three shelves: There’s Microsoft’s award-winning Arc Touch mouse, nearly half a dozen K2 Snowboard boots, a couple of Nike sports watches, and at the end of the middle shelf, an assortment of HTC phones. The Taiwanese hardware manufacturer acquired One & Co in October 2008, and since 2011, Croyle has been the VP of Design for HTC. And right now he wants to show off something new: the 8X and 8S, HTC’s debut Windows Phone 8 devices.
The two phones are stunners. The 8X’s polycarbonate unibody wraps around to a curved 4.3-inch Gorilla Glass display. The corners are slightly rounded, so that the device looks rectangular without appearing boxy. The 8S has similar lines, but in a smaller 4-inch package. Both come in an array of bright colors.
“We went in and said, ‘You know what, we haven’t done [Windows Phone] justice,’” Croyle says. “The marketplace hasn’t done it justice. Let’s design something from the ground up thinking of Windows.”
Croyle is forthcoming in calling out other companies out for what he sees as lackluster hardware design. “[The current phones] are either kind of big or they’re clunky or they are designs that come from a previous era — even some of the products that were launched in the last few weeks,” he says. “Lumia, what you saw that come from was the N9. It’s not like it was designed for Windows; it was designed for something else.”
“Or [companies] are using the same design as for Android. They’ll just squeeze in that Metro design language on top of an Android phone which creates a lot of tension,” adds Claude Zellweger, Principal and co-founder of One & Co.
Nokia had been very public about Samsung’s device being a “warm-up act” to its Lumia Windows Phone announcement in early September. The Lumia 920 has so far received a lot of praise (albeit the company got caught faking an advertising video). But now, HTC wants to show which device is truly Windows Phone 8′s main act.
“I can tell you, just based on the response from Microsoft and carrier partners globally and domestically, this is our best shot,” Croyle says. “This is Windows Phone’s best shot to really make a big statement in the market.”
While hardware specs for hardware specs’ sake certainly won’t get any company ahead in the smartphone market, the marriage between hardware and software will. And HTC’s design team is well aware of this.
“We do see on the hardware spec side there’s certain leveling in the industry,” says Zellweger. “That makes the design even more important. What you hold in your hand becomes the big differentiator aside from software. So certainly wanting to have a design that caters to the software, having that synergy between the two, it’s what makes all the difference.”
The results are two very light and thin phones that feature curved backs where the edges are the thinnest parts of the devices. And there are some decent specs, too. The 8X has a 1.5Ghz Qualcomm dual-core processor, the same 8MP camera found in HTC’s One series phones, an impressive front-facing camera and Beats Audio. And the phones both feel as good as they look, with soft, matte polycarbonate shells that HTC calls “Pillow Design.”
“It starts with this idea of the tiles,” Croyle says. “How can you actually take that 2-D tile and add a third dimension to it and make it into a product? That was really the inspiration, keeping it pure, pure, pure.”
But to get there, the team had to start from scratch. The various molds and sketches on display show how meticulous HTC had be in order to develop a phone that stands above the rest in design. Everything down to the receiver accents and shape that give the 8X and 8S their distinctive looks went through hundreds of iterations.
“It’s about cleanliness,” Zellweger says. “It’s a very reductionist kind of approach that Microsoft has pursued, so we wanted our design to have the same philosophy.”
One of the biggest challenges the team faced was reengineering the phone’s internals to accommodate the Pillow Design back. For example, the batteries for the 8X and 8S sit between the display and circuit board, rather than flush against the back panel.
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