FYI, I still don’t have an iPhone yet. Why?
Despite of how much I love the iPhone, I still don’t believe in signing a two year contract for AT&T/Cingular. I’ve been a customer with Cingular back since when they were PacBell PCS, I have no reason to be locked down to a contract to prove my loyalty to a carrier. Especially since the iPhone isn’t subsidized at all. If signing a contract meant I can save a few hundred dollars, then at least the value proposition is existent. There is absolutely no reason to a sign a contract for a phone that will inevitably be unlocked (and probably be available at the same price).
Service issues aside, the iPhone itself is simply one of the most brilliant consumer product ever made. It is a device that will completely reshape the mobile phone market. The problem is, the other phone manufacturers seem to be thinking, “Wow, the iPhone has a touchscreen, we must all move to touchscreen-only phones as well.” I’m not saying that iPhone’s touchscreen isn’t brilliant, but it isn’t the end-all solution to the woes of the mobile phone design we’ve seen in the past decade.
There are already several manufacturers that’s decided to manufacture their own versions of a touchscreen phone. Some of which has been offering touchscreen capability for years (for example, most of HTC’s Windows Mobile based phones). The problem with these phones isn’t whether or not your buttons are placed on a screen or engraved into a rubber nub, the problem is the underlying unresponsive, inadequate, and sometimes down-right ugly software.
It’s easy to credit an obvious invention (even though touchscreen has always been around, the type that iPhone uses, basically a type of clear laptop touchpad, is completely new to the market) for the success of a hardware product; ultimately it isn’t just the hardware design, but how the hardware design interact, melds and works with the underlying software. I don’t find the buttons on my Razr hard to press, I don’t find the features on my HTC Windows Mobile phone to be so hard to access or inadequate; but I also don’t understand why everything I do on either of these phones seems to take place 3 seconds after I’ve executed a command, clicked a button, or even just scrolling through the address book.
Years and years ago, there was this great, ambitious operating system called BeOS. It was built from the ground up to be a multi-threaded, multi-CPU operating system. The most impressive aspect of BeOS, was how responsive it was at handling tasks that were extremely taxing to other operating system at the time. You can run multiple windows of videos, move them around the screen, resize them and still have lightning fast response. Mind you, this was the age when most users were still living with Windows 3.1 (maybe some on Windows 95?). The software engineers of BeOS were able to achieve this, because they were very aware that the outward responsiveness of an OS is just as important to its interaction with the user as the underlying operations.
For example, while another OS will prioritize the task of writing files to the disk, BeOS prioritized the playback of that file being written, saved, copied. The writing of the file can still be finished up in the background, but the immediate feedback of that file being worked on is the most important thing to the user, and delivered a level of interactivity that was far more appreciable. The OS was instantaneously more robust because it made sure that you knew what it is doing, what you’ve done, then went ahead and finished up all those tasks in the background where it wouldn’t bother you.
That is in essence one of the most important aspect about the iPhone. On the first week of iPhone’s release, CNet even performed a real-life, side-by-side test of iPhone’s UI speed against what Apple were showing in the commercial. There were all sorts of accusation that Apple had fussed with the footage, sped up some parts, edited out the lag time in between. Well, the CNet guys found that almost second by second, they can do everything that was done in the commercial with their iPhone. Sure, the touchscreen UI is slick and intuitive, but it is also the amazing responsiveness of the UI, the underlying robustness of the software, that really sets the iPhone apart from any phone that you’ve ever used before.
Another company named Pasen put out this video on Youtube recently:
Sure, it’s a touchscreen device that completely rips off the iPhone. Look at the video, watch the number of times you had to click, double-click, drag fingers around, try to see if the device is responding. Wait, what is it doing now? Did I just select that? Is that playing now? How do I.. wait, let me click on that again.
I hope the rest of the consumer electronics industry doesn’t follow suit. It’s not just about the touchscreen.
