Pathfinder Development

The Iphone, why.

Charles Field, Saturday, January 20, 2007 @ 6:06 pm

Years ago I would go to conferences and people would hold up their Palm and lecture us on why it worked, the economy of means, the elegance. Time passed and the same people - usually people who had not actually participated in the design process of the particular device - would hold up an Ipod and preach the wonders of the clickwheel and how it had revolutionized design on the order of bread slicers or fishnet hose.

That they usually missed the point was irrelevant. The value of the Palm was that it was much smaller than a Newton, and much faster because Palm asked people what they actually used. And both of them had coherent software interfaces that easily synced the stuff on your desktop machine. That the Ipod made having many gigabytes of purloined music sort of marginally legitimate was not trivial, either.

So I wanted to get in on the ground floor of helping Apple hype the Ipod phone, because I am predicting that this will save me a significant amount in conference fees over the next two years.

Why does this phone elicit responses like Alice’s, a post or two back? Which I fully admit I shared as all the Mac addicts read the real time blogs from Macworld while jobs was unveiling it. Oh yeah, it is cool!

But what it makes such a big splash is a study in contrasts, and how the competition failed to develop and market something that people can feel affection for.

The current crop of cellphones are junk. There are so many difficult to use features that the cellphone companies market a special line of simple phones for the very young, very old or especially annoyed.

And the phone companies are completely oblivious to this resistance. Because of the way that cell phones are sold, really as a token of the extortionist contract with the service provider, there is a critical reduction that occurs to the feedback from the user. The design of the phones is passed on as a feature list and separated from everything else in the users existence. An elaborate, undoubtably extensively discussed system to create a broken wheel.

The worst thing about the current phones - and don’t get me wrong, Razors look cool and have great ads - is that if you lose it your numbers and all of the phone specific programming is gone. Unless you have a Trio or a Blackberry, you are just out of luck. But even Trio’s and Blackberries don’t have a good mp3/mp4 implementation. Much less the overwhelming cultural currency [read: cool] of the Ipod.

The Ipod advantage in both cases is it’s connection to the desktop.

For phone numbers, it leverages a much more powerful interface; your desktop through any Vcard compliant program. So you have all of your email addresses on the phone; and backed up. Think weeks of texting saved. Imagine what you will do with that time.

In terms of features, the new phone is configurable. Which means, to a luddite like me, that you can turn most of them off. Thankyouverymuch!

Not having to carry around my Ipod and my phone is probably the least of the advantages. Waiting until all the early adopters buy it and the price falls will be the hard part.

Topics: Best Practices, Design, Desktop, Interaction Design, iPhone, Usability