A few points:
1. There's more to life than speaking English as a first language. Personally, I always applaud the guy whose English language skills are rough around the edges. At least he can speak more than one language well, which is more than I can say for most of my friends.
2. The guys in the video speak English very well. I know this because my mother was an English teacher, I have been an English teacher and I'm currently a writer with two books out. The person who's complaining has confused English language skills with an American accent. The men in the video have accents. Their English usage is fine.
3. I love the fact that it's those guys telling me about the phone and not Steve Jobs. The world is huge and includes America, but its experiential vocabulary should not be limited to American points of reference. Global innovation is so much bigger than any single country.
Besides which, don't you get tired of blockbuster franchises? Which would you rather see, another sequel to Transformers or a new Last Life in the Universe?
4. The presentation was emotional and personal and emphasized simplicity. In those respects it resembled Jobs's presentation style, but the presenters added concepts that have never occurred to Jobs. With Apple, the world is an opaque projector. It's always about Jobs showing slides on his rectangular screen. Now look at HTC's surround screen on steroids, and how it reproduces the sense of being surrounded by stimuli in the world. Notice the emphasis on motion and transition. That isn't an imitation of Jobs. That's original. Give HTC credit.
5. I love the fact that HTC is this focused on phones. Samsung is a great company, and I love their keyboards and screens. But the tender little details in HTC's hardware/software integration show the care and commitment of the devs and designers, and it's hard not to acknowledge the superiority of that approach to Samsung's kitchen-sink inclusiveness.
6. The HD Desire HD is tackling all of the design limitations that made me forgo the Evo reluctantly. I love that phone, but I specifically need a qwerty keyboard as a writer. The Desire HD provides that, and if the Evo had had one, I'd own an Evo now without question.
7. I love metal, and the Desire HD looks sexier to me than the Evo, but it also looks like a Canon SD940, which is a wee tad fragile. I wonder whether the Evo won't prove to be more durable than the Desire HD over time. And I wonder whether HTC's new take on the clamshell won't bring with it new design flaws (always a potential liability of design innovation).
8. I'm not sure I like the choices HTC made in terms of the keyboard layout. I think I prefer the Epic's layout (with the exception of the horrible smiley key), but my feelings might change completely when I'm holding the Desire HD and using it myself.
8. I'm hoping Sprint will carry the next-gen HTC phones (though people on this thread have referred to the Desire HD as "European"). Does anyone know if they will?
