Martin Hill

The iPhone: Apple's First Flop

Todd, I like many others am shaking my head at the holes in your arguments. I’ll restrict myself to your “More isn’t always better” argument for now though as others have eloquently addressed most of the other issues.

You are correct that “featuritis” and “all-in-ones” are often jacks of all trades but masters of none. My wife and I both have Windows mobile-powered HTC-designed PDA-smartphones (O2 Mini and O2 XDA IIs) which suffer from exactly this ailment. They’ll do just about anything and run almost any software but I am getting to the stage of loathing mine as it is the worst phone/PDA I have ever used. The OS crashes and freezes daily, texting, the address book, connecting to wifi, launching apps, the blasted start menu etc are all some of the worst-designed pieces of software I’ve ever seen. Physically my XDA IIs has so many plastic buttons and a slide-out keyboard half of which don’t work anymore that I am about to go back to using my old Sony Ericsson P900 PDA phone which despite it’s own problems is so much better as a phone and PDA it’s like night and day.

However, you don’t seem to be aware that simplicity and elegant integration is Apple’s mantra meaning that this issue will be at the forefront of all of the design considerations with the iPhone. Haven’t you noticed that despite the elegance and ease of use of the iPod, it actually does have a huge number of extra features including video playback, games, calendar, address book (all synchronised with your master computer), alarm clock, stopwatch, world clocks, equalizer, password-protected volume limiter, etc etc. The difference is in the design and details. For example, Apple has elegantly made sure the FM radio controls only appear when you plug in the optional FM radio remote control, the audio recording menu only appears when you plug in a Belkin or MicroMemo microphone adapter, etc so they don’t clutter up the interface when not in use. Apple takes the time to make all of the elements masters of the trade – not chucked in bloat like most Microsoft designs.

As far as people not wanting a device that does everything – you couldn’t be more wrong. I have a 60GB video iPod that I just don’t use anymore because I got fed up carrying it and my cell phone with me all the time. People do want to carry around a device that does all the tasks you might want to do when mobile as long as all the functions work well individually and together. Not hacked-together with an awful mess of an interface like Windows Mobile and to a lesser degree Symbian or Palm.

As far as your comment that Apple should sell the iPhone with only 2GB of storage – are you crazy? About the only reason I may not get the initial version of the iPhone is because it doesn’t have <b>enough</b&... storage to store all my music photos and video. Haven’t you seen the recent ChangeWave survey that indicated the main reason people wanted an iPhone was because it had so much storage capacity! The number one reason for wanting the iPhone is storage for crying out loud!

Sheesh.

-Mart