iBacklash
To hear Apple die-hards tell it, the new iPhone will be the greatest thing against sliced bread — which, they note, does not automatically reconfigure itself depending on which way it’s held, nor does it connect to the Internet, switching over to wi-fi where available.
I’m not so sure, myself, since it mostly seems to be a crippled Treo merged with a small iPod. The Apple fans who claim that an iPhone can do everything a Treo can seem to have never used a Treo. Mine is a lot more than a phone, camera, calendar and chat client, and most folks I know that use one have likewise loaded it up with additional programs, both commercial and shareware, greatly expanding its capabilities.
And it looks like I’m not alone in this view:
Knowledge@Wharton: The iPhone has a lot of cool features. Are there too many, and is the price — starting at $500 — too high?
Fader: Well it’s not going to be too high for the first few hundred thousand people who just have to have it. You can charge them anything and they’ll pay anything. But for the mass market, if they really want to create something that is anywhere close to what the iPod did, it is very expensive.
And, I think on the feature side, it doesn’t really have that many features. In fact, it’s missing some really, really important features. What it has [going] for it is just a really cool design factor and that’s not enough. It’s going to help them to differentiate themselves from the other phones out there, but it’s not going to be enough to really be a winning entry.
Knowledge@Wharton: What other features [would you imagine] should it include?
Fader: Well, one of the things that it must include is a key pad. I think that it’s very important for people to be able to type or at least text message, and to be able to do that just on the screen instead of having actual keys is going to be very disappointing. There are a lot of people who won’t even give it a try because of the absence of that. And then there’s just some of the lack of the integration with Outlook and other standard bits of software that are becoming quite common with so many phones today.
Knowledge@Wharton: Do you think consumers are tired of juggling multiple devices though? Does the iPhone at least address that problem?
Fader: I don’t think it does. I think about how many people right now are carrying around an iPod and a Blackberry or a Treo, and this kind of falls in between the two. In some sense it’s not as simple; it’s not as small as an iPod. So, it’s a bigger iPod but not necessarily a better one. And, while it does function as a phone, it does lack some features, as we just mentioned. So I think that the large numbers of people who are in that modality are not going to have their needs satisfied here.
The absolutely accurately named Cult of Mac blog at Wired disagrees:
I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but in the United States, the vast majority of people still don’t understand what good design is really about. Good design is not about aesthetics. It’s about solving people’s needs. It’s about clarifying the complex. It’s about looking good AND working better. People care a little bit about features. They care way more about knowing how to use them.
Does he know what he’s even arguing in terms of design here? The breakthrough on the iPhone is not how it looks. It’s how it works. Don’t look at the appearance of the interface, look at how brilliantly the iPhone switches modes and hooks its features into one another. It’s about integration AND intuition. You don’t have to make trade-offs.
Certainly not if you don’t really want a smartphone, no matter what Jobs may have sneered about the phones in that category in his presentation.
Anyway, the Wharton professor and the Mac cult leader are continuing to go back and forth over this at Wired:
Where’s the growth in the smart phone market? Not by trying to get people to trade in their BlackBerry tomorrow, let me tell you. It’s in convincing the millions of people with fairly commodity cell phones and an iPod that what they really want to do is trade in both for an iPhone. It’s an unclaimed market space, and its overhead is nearly unstoppable. Apple’s tool for getting there is around a revolutionary interface and not just an iPod but THE BEST iPOD IN THE WORLD built in so people actually understand how to use all the features already found in smart phones everywhere.
It’s what Apple is counting on. And if they’re wrong — they certainly might be, especially about the small virtual keyboard, which no one has tried out, particularly — they can get it right next time. They can learn over time and roll out a really amazing product line to make the iPhone resemble the iPod line. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Apple’s death grip on the MP3 market. They face a tremendous adoption problem — they’re wisely going super high-end to cater to early adopters. They can learn from those early adopters to make the product better, smaller, cheaper and more customized. That’s when everyone else will want one — including the people staunchly defending their Treos and BlackBerrys right now.
I’d love to be able to get rid of my iPod or my Treo and have a single all-in-one device, but the first generation iPhone doesn’t look like it’s going to fit the bill. In the interim, I’m just going to wait on the next generation of the video iPod, which I assume will show up this fall, and have the same widescreen and touchscreen aspects of the iPhone, but will have its other guts replaced with a substantial 30 GB or larger iPod hard drive.
