Apple shook up the mobile phone playing field with the introduction of the original iPhone a year ago. Phones with touchscreens were nothing new; most Windows Mobile phones have used them for years. But the older phones used resistive digitizer screens, which were operated by a tiny metal stylus. The iPhone uses a capacitive digitizer that’s operated by touching fingers to the screen — a remarkably convenient option, by comparison. It didn’t take consumers long to figure out this was the way to go with touch and other phone makers quickly followed Apple’s lead.

While making a handset with a touchscreen is no big technical feat, the process quickly makes clear the pivotal role that Apple’s UI plays in producing a good user experience. Indeed, UI often ends up being the crucial factor that separates the good phones from the rest. And while the number of phones competing with the iPhone is growing all the time, most come from three companies:

HTC -- Until the last couple of years, HTC was largely making phones for other companies, such as Palm. But once they introduced their own brand to the market, they quickly established themselves as high-end device makers. HTC was also one of the first to dive headfirst into the touch phone pool, and have since produced model after model.

The first (and still available) was the HTC Touch, a phone based on the Windows Mobile platform. Going with the Windows Mobile OS was an easy decision for HTC since it’s a mature platform with tools to handle both the consumer and enterprise markets. The problem is that it wasn’t designed from the ground up for a touch operation, which can severely limit such a phone’s usability. So HTC designed the TouchFLO interface, which sits on top of the Windows Mobile base and adds touch features.

While the HTC Touch wasn’t a bad first attempt, it fell short of being a solid competitor to the iPhone. It followed up this year with the release of the Touch Diamond. A sleek black phone with an enhanced UI designed for touch, it has been well received. And since Windows Mobile has more features than the iPhone, the Touch Diamond was an instant, solid competitor.

This month HTC extended their touch offering with the Touch Pro, which is very similar to the Diamond but also includes a slide-out QWERTY keypad for business users. The lack of such a feature on the iPhone has been roundly criticized by serious email users.

Currently HTC is creating a lot of buzz in the enthusiast community with its yet-to-be-released handset, the Dream. This touch phone is said to be based on the brand-new Google Android platform that T-Mobile is expected to launch next month. Information is gradually leaking out about the Dream — it looks like a device similar to the Touch Pro, complete with a large touchscreen coupled with a sliding QWERTY keyboard.

LG — Electronics giant LG has been making feature phones for years and have produced some solid touchscreen, non-phone devices. Feature phones have typically been viewed as less capable than their smartphone competition, but that criticism is harder to make these days as feature phones can now handle PIM functions and messaging. LG’s first touchscreen phone was the Voyager, which includes two displays — one big touchscreen on the front of the device, as is common, and a non-touchscreen on the inside. The keyboard flips up like a small laptop to be used with the interior screen, making the Voyager a distinctly different type of phone.

Most recently LG has followed up with the Dare, a phone without a keyboard that is touchscreen only. The UI, however, has been optimized for touch operation.

Samsung — Electronics firm Samsung has jumped into the touch phone game in a big way with the recent release of the Instinct, using a media advertising blitz to make clear how serious they were about this new genre. The Instinct has only been out a short while, but it’s already getting rave reviews, and from experts that are known for being hard on such devices. Its web browsing capabilities, notably, rival that of the iPhone.

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My post, How to standout in a sea of storage startups resulted in a spirited conversation, including some really insightful comments here and else where on the web. Raghu Kulkarni, CEO of Pro Softnet, a Woodland Hills, Calif.-based company said not only he is selling his IDrive and IBackup offerings, he is making a hefty profit. Apparently he isn’t the only one seeing brisk sales of online back-up services.

David Friend, CEO of Carbonite emailed to let us know that his Boston-based company is doing well. “We’ve enjoyed 26 consecutive months of double-digit month-over-month revenue growth,” he wrote in an email. He claimed “hundreds of thousands people paying about $50 every year in subscription fees. Theoretically, at 100,000 subscribers, the company could bring in an estimated $5 million a year.

While he agreed with the premise of the original article — little or no hope for ad supported services — he points out that many online storage services are doing too many things when people are looking for simple solutions. “Pure, simple, set-and-forget online backup is thriving,” he wrote in an email, pointing out that “Online backup is a great subscription business.  You pay your money and your worries go away. The user’s problem is clear:  “Protect me from disk crashes, theft, fire, viruses.”

Maybe that explains why EMC acquired Mozy for $76 million and Symantec paid $123 million for Swapdrive. Carbonite wouldn’t mind a pay-day like that: three year old company has raised a total of $17.5 million in two rounds of funding from Menlo Ventures, 3i Group and Common Angels.

“I think that when the dust settles in four or five years, the online backup market is going to look a lot like the anti-virus market. Almost every PC is going to ship with online backup built-in,” Carbonite Friend writes. Dell currently sells such a service. In such a scenario, broadband service providers who are looking to pad their ARPU might snap up some of these back-up services and offer them to their customers. Broadband Service Providers have already started to experiment with support and other such value services.

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* Options for back up your files (WebWorkerDaily)

Broadband service providers are looking to add higher-value services to their offerings, services that could soon include a virtual desktop for consumers. Indeed, the idea of a service provider offering a PC as a Service (PCaaS), essentially a PC in the cloud, may be coming to your broadband connection sooner than you might think. Here is how a virtual desktop would work: You’d have an access device at your location, called a thin client, which would connect your keyboard, video screen and mouse (KVM) to the service provider’s broadband network. (For more detail on thin clients, see Stacey’s recent post.)

The thin client could be a hardware device or it could be a piece of software running on your current PC. In either implementation, the thin client sends all of your KVM data from your location to a server hosted in the service provider’s network. All PC functions and applications would be running on the server in the network and the only data going between your location and the server would be KVM information.

That is the major benefit of a virtual desktop: All operating system files, applications, documents, security software and so on are located on the server. All you need at your location is the thin client and you get access to your full desktop. These benefits, however, also highlight the main drawback of a virtual desktop: lack of portability. Moving your data from one virtual desktop to another may not be a trivial task and some applications may not be portable into a virtual desktop at all.

The technology to offer a virtual desktop has been around for a number of years. Companies such as Citrix, VMware, Microsoft and others already provide software to virtualize user desktops and connect to thin clients. The main issue with these offerings has been their performance relative to local computers. I, for example, was subjected to the horrors of using a software-based thin client connected to a server in a remote location, and the performance was abysmal at best.

But two fundamental technologies that may solve the virtual desktop performance issues already exist. The first is the proliferation of broadband Internet. Using a thin client to connect to a remote virtual desktop server over a multimegabit link that is within the same metropolitan area can provide reasonable performance. The second technology is KVM enhanced by hardware. Companies such as Teradici and Pano Logic provide hardware acceleration and compression for the KVM data passing from a thin client to the server — to the point where the performance difference between a local computer desktop and a virtual desktop is nearly indistinguishable. Using these technologies, the performance of the virtual desktop could even provide a graphics-intensive experience, such as playing a 1080p HD movie in one window and playing an action-packed game in another.

Assuming that the technologies exist to enable service providers to offer virtual desktops for consumers, from a business perspective, PCaaS has numerous appealing qualities. Broadband customers that use a virtual desktop will more than likely pay for a higher-bandwidth broadband service. Given the portability issues around virtual desktops, this also provides a clever mechanism to lock the consumer onto a specific network, which would ostensibly result in lower churn. I can also envision different product bundles for consumer-focused virtual desktops: a basic desktop with a browser only, an enterprise desktop with Microsoft Office applications enabled and a gaming/HD desktop that comes bundled with a hardware-based thin client branded by the service provider (Here’s your AT&T desktop access device!). Additional options could be storage space, accessibility options (Do you want to access your desktop from any TV and your mobile phone? Please pay us $5 more per month) or peripheral device support (such as printers and webcams).

One question that needs to be answered is how service providers could offer virtual desktops in conjunction with their metered bandwidth services. If I am sending lots of KVM data to a virtual desktop hosted by my service provider, you can be darned sure I don’t want be billed on a bandwidth meter.

But perhaps the biggest unknown around the PCaaS business is the user support that would be required. Service provider support organizations are better known for frustrating their users than helping them. Extending these support organizations to answer a myriad of desktop, application and device peripheral issues might be too much for them. An alternative may be for service providers to outsource the application and peripheral support to someone like Microsoft, similar to today’s relationship between MSN and Qwest.

With all of this to consider, are you ready to give up the hassles of managing your own desktop for a virtual desktop run by your service provider?