The more I orbit the solar system of iPhone commentary the more eccentric my orbit becomes. A few hours ago it became so eccentric I smashed into the planet known as The Touchscreen Debate; first rock from the sun, closest to the damning and purifying fire. I burnt up as I plummeted through the thick atmosphere of touchscreen criticism and ended up a cinder in their camp. How can I dial without looking at it? Gestures might help but that isn’t intuitive, you have to learn that. No tactile feedback seems a killer blow, a meteoric impact.
And so I began fiddling around with my Nokia mobile phone, a very basic model which does nothing well but is better than the more expensive, complicated devices which do nothing at all, least of all audio.
I realised I didn’t actually use speed dial. Most of my phone usage is texting, good old SMS. Who speed dials an SMS? I realised I didn’t sit in meetings furtively texting under a table either. The only two times I ever used the keypad without looking was when I was driving, which is pretty dangerous and illegal so maybe it isn’t a good thing we can do that anyway, and when I locked and unlocked the keypad. The latter you can do without looking on the iPhone too, you just drag your fingers across the screen, apparently.
The more I used my Nokia the more I remembered how much I hated the software interface on it. Not the physical interface but the software. Reading an old text takes 5 key-presses and about 7 seconds for the inbox too load. If I want to read the next message I have to press 3 keys to get out of the current one and back into the inbox. Sending a text takes about 7 key-presses (excluding the message) and depends on where the contact is in the list. Scrolling menus is a click, click, click, click, click affair. No smooth scroll, no dragging a finger down a screen or trackpad.
Getting a number from a text into the phone book is a chore. Finding a contact and reading a note is a mission. Visiting a URL, even a bookmarked one, involves so many sub-menus I cannot tell anyone where it is on the Nokia. I have to find that menu again everytime I want it.
Pretty much everything takes more key-presses, more scrolling and more waiting than it should.
The iPhone might not have a keypad but the software on it has the potential to be like the software on my MacBook Pro. Intuitive, aesthetically pleasing, taller than 7 lines of monochrome text. Things that work vertically will work well, things that work horizontally (landscape) will work better.
If I want to enter numbers on my Nokia during a text message I have to hold down the number key for 3 seconds to tell the phone that I want the number and not one of the three possible letters. That makes entering an 8 digit phone number take almost half a minute. On the iPhone I’ll have a QWERTY keyboard and a numeric keypad available whenever I need.
Wait a minute. How can I say any of this when you, me and 99% of Earth haven’t even used the iPhone? Call it a hunch. Call it “I’ve used Apple software and it is more usable.” Call it “An iPod with a tiny, monochrome screen is fifty times easier to use than most smartphones with full-colour, 8 inch screens.”
Call it what you want but Apple know how to do user interfaces. And that is what they have done with the iPhone. They have looked at Nokia, looked at Motorola, looked at even the BlackBerry and laughed so hard they’d almost prefer to be Zune users.
Then they went and put Apple UI know-how on a mobile phone.
That can’t be bad.
