I had an opportunity to work with a BlackBerry Storm phone for a client the other day. Granted, I believe it was an “original” Storm (which was widely criticized when released but later updates helped fix some issues), but let me just say it really made me appreciate the iPhone so much more. I’ve played around with Storms before, but this particular time I had to enter in a lot of text. And it was basically the difference in the ease of typing that was most glaring. It is really difficult to explain with words how difficult it was for me to type with the Storm, but suffice to say it is evident just how much effort Apple has put into making the Touch OS as user-friendly as possible. For users who have only owned an iPhone or iPod Touch, they may not appreciate or even realize the attention to detail that goes into making their devices as simple and easy to use as they are. Luckily for me I have used many smartphones over the years. I have experience with a lot of different designs so I have a feel for good and bad designs. Still every once in a while I have an experience like this that surprises me.
This experience made me realize something else. In the 3 years since the iPhone was released, the interface has remained almost identical. Yes, there have been improvements, but for the most part it is the same interface as it was in 2007. Contrast this to the phones from BlackBerry, Palm, and most recently Google. Each of those vendors have released several different phones, with different names, each with different hardware interfaces (for example hard keys vs soft keys) and with many differences in software interface. Apple has had 3 total phones. At quick glance, it is hard to distinguish them, especially the 3G and 3GS phones. And that’s the beauty of it. Apple gets it. People don’t care for or necessarily need an excessive amount of choices. Build it and they will come (but build it right the first time – unlike the Storm). And from a marketing standpoint, it is so much easier to promote a singular concept (the “iPhone”) then a mess of devices that all have different features.
