Jan 11, 2007
Obligatory iPhone post
After watching iPhone demo in Jobs’ keynote I had a major iPhone lust. I’ve since cooled down a lot after learning that chances are that it’s going to be completely closed or, at best, closely guarded platform.
But I just want to point out what has not been discussed much: iPhone UI improvements over other mobile devices like Palm OS, Symbian, j2me phones, Windows Mobile or Nokia 770.
An obvious difference is multi-touch interface. Hard to tell if it’s an improvement without using it first.
Another is giving as much screen space to the app as possible. Even on a relatively big screen, the screen space is still a valuable thing. Windows Mobile and Symbian by default take ridiculous (relative to the overall size) amount of screen space for the upper bar and lower menu bar. Nokia 770 steals some screen space from apps on the left of the screen. It’s irritating because that bar is not very useful. In contrast, iPhone only steals a relatively small amount of space at the top for the most important information (word “Cingular”, antenna signal strength, time and battery status).
One reason for having some dedicated space always visible is to allow switching to other apps. Apple solved this neatly with the only “go home” hardware button.
Another thing I liked is that they eliminated scrollbar. Scrollbars or Windows Mobile are plain ugly, take a lot of space and, in the end, aren’t very useful as a way to scroll content. Palm does a bit better (scrallbars take less space and are less ugly). On iPhone scrollbars only show up when you scroll, to visualize the position, and go away when you stop scrolling.
Another nice thing is that they were able to provide slick effects (all those animated transitions of rotating a web page or zooming into a launched application) with good performance. It’s not that it’s impossible to do in general but it will be very hard to retrofit such things onto existing operating system like Palm or Windows Mobile. Their priorities are supporting all the existing apps while Apple was able to leap-frog them in some areas thanks to starting from scratch.
And finally Apple designers deserve recognition. They carried over the design magic from OSX - somehow the apps have functionality on par with their Symbian or Windows Mobile counterparts but have less interface. Windows Mobile, in comparison, looks clunky and infested with too many menu items, too many settings, too many clicks, too many icons.
iPhone delivers consistently good design with style - something that cannot be said about any existing mobile product. Enthusiastic response it received is deserved.
The question is: will it be a run-away success like iPod or will it end up irrelevant like Mac OS. The answer might depend on whether phone/mobile market is more like iPod (buy it and use it, with very limited hardware customization and no software customization) or PC (where hardware + OS is essentially useless and the real usefulness comes from infinite customizability through thousands of applications available).