Dave Snowdon

I finally got around to buying an iPhone 3G about a month ago. I thought about writing a review but didn’t because there is not exactly a shortage of iPhone reviews out there. However, I do feel that one of the central lessons of the iPhone’s success has not been learnt by Apple’s competitors.

When the iPhone was first launched there were people queuing up to announce that it would be a flop because:

• it was over priced
• it didn’t have 3G
• it didn’t have GPS
• other phones had better cameras
• etc

Basically you could sum most of the arguments up as "my Nokia/Motorola/Blackberry does all this and more and was cheaper." The now obvious rejoinder is "yes, but you don’t use most of those features because the user interface sucks."

Many other people have pointed out the problems with comparing lists of features. The most important feature "a user interface that does not suck" never appears on iPhone detractors lists of features.

Once it became obvious that the iPhone was a success you might naively have thought that other manufacturers would pick up on this but they didn’t really. Instead we got a spate of phones with touch sensitive screens such as the Blackberry Storm and the Samsung Tocco. I’ve never used a Blackberry Storm so I won’t say any more except that I’ve yet to read a positive review of it. Anyway, you can see the thought process going on chez Samsung et al "multitouch screen equals success; therefore we must build a multitouch phone."

Now I would like to contend that a multitouch screen is not necessarily essential. Imagine for a moment that Apple had not gifted the iPhone with a multitouch screen. It might be very little like the iPhone we know but, and here’s the important point : would Apple have thought any less about the user experience? No, of course not. I think it’s possible to conceive of Apple producing a great phone without multitouch because they would focus just as hard on producing a "user interface that does not suck." That is the lesson that other phone manufacturers should have learned instead they were distracted by the shiny new technology.

On Friday, I had the chance to use a Samsung Tocco when the husband of one of my colleagues asked me how to turn of the annoying key sound. Now, a key click does not sound like a bad idea - lots of devices have this, including the iPhone. Now imagine a key sound [2] that is:

• an annoying jingle,
• long in duration (I didn’t time it but it seemed like a second at least),
• LOUD,
• accompanied by aggressive use of the phone’s vibrator,
• not obviously disabled.
• happens every time you touch a key on the phone.

Does this sound like a good user experience to you? Does it seem like a sensible default. The poor guy was so desperate that he would put the phone into silent mode when he wanted to do something because it was the only way he’d found to get rid of the key sound. Now, we did manage to sort this out but only after googling. You see there are phone settings that are easily accessible but they don’t give you the option of turning of the key sound - instead there is an unlabelled button next to each phone profile which contains more settings and once you’ve pressed that button, and selected the right sub-menu you can turn the volume down and make the phone usable.

Now, while I was messing about with the Tocco trying to turn off the key sound I necessarily got to see a bit of it’s user interface. The Tocco has both a keypad and a touch screen and they’ve copied some of the iPhone’s user interface gestures such as the "flick to scroll." However, rather than learning the real lesson of the iPhone’s success they’ve just attached these new features to the existing krappy interface and stirred some dumb defaults (ie truly obnoxious key sound) into the mix to produce truly awesome levels of suckage.

Based on my experience with the Tocco I would say that Apple’s biggest concern with the iPhone should be not shooting itself in the foot and sorting out the lunacy that is the app store approvals process.