The Big Mobile Touchscreen Question
Historically, touchscreens have essentially been a failure in mobile devices. They simply don’t work as well as devices with hardware buttons. As everyone knows, however, this hasn’t stopped Apple betting their mobile phone platform on touch.
It’s now just a little over a week until we find out if Apple has managed to do something amazing, and made touchscreens a killer feature in mobile phones. Will the iPhone interface work well enough? This really is a big question because, if the iPhone interface does work well, we should expect no less than a complete revolution in the design of mobile handsets.
When I wrote the other day, rather sarcastically, about Nokia’s epiphany on touch, it was with the knowledge that the long-term success of iPhone is actually by no means a foregone conclusion. It’s going to be totally fascinating to see if Apple’s bet has paid off…
Asam Bashir wrote:
I wouldn’t say touch screens have been a failure in the development of PDAs, just that the idea of a PDA without phone seems dated in the era of converged devices - In this respect then, its a bit of a circle that Apple started with the Newton, and now is continuing with the iPhone. What ever happens to the iPhone now, it has certainly made an impact on the rest of the industry already.
Wonder what the mechanism/strategy will be for how the phone is locked to AT&T - I don’t see any slots for a sim card, and no battery cover to open even. Maybe it doesn’t even have a sim card?
Posted 22 Jun 2007 at 1:54 am ¶
simon wrote:
I guess it depends on your definition of success. I’d say that PDAs have been a pretty much a failure in the market place when compared to mobile phones.
And, to date, touch screen mobile phones have essentially failed in the market place when compared to phones with hardware keypads.
I think the Apple multi-touch gesture interface looks great. I think it could be a revolution. It’s a big bet though, and the devil’s in the detail in making this kind of things a success. We’ll know what the market thinks pretty soon!
Posted 22 Jun 2007 at 9:46 am ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
Well to be correct, we’ll know what the US market thinks…….
Posted 22 Jun 2007 at 4:49 pm ¶
simon wrote:
That’s true! Although, if Apple has really screwed up, we’ll know about it pretty soon, I suspect
There are some big questions we’ll have good information on right away e.g.
o Does the touch screen get too grimy, too quickly? That’s what happens with existing devices where you’re supposed to use finger touch - like the LG Prada.
o Does the touch interface work generally less effectively than hardware buttons? That’s the case with all current touch screen mobiles.
o Is it really the best iPod, or is the hardware click wheel of existing iPods a killer feature?
And others it will take a while to find out e.g.
o Are video games playable without hardware buttons? I used to have the phone they say inspired Jobs to do the iPhone (the SE P800). And it was lousy for games: both purpose-built games for the touch screen; and also Java games, where the gameplay is designed around having a hardware keypad; emulating that in touch was a disaster.
Posted 22 Jun 2007 at 6:00 pm ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
Well I’m learning about what’s wrong with too many buttons and Nokia’s S60 3rd edition interface ha-ha - how long does it take for Nokia to ship firmware updates? Lost count now the number of times my E65 has rebooted during bluetooth file transfer. Hopefully Nokia will learn some more from Apple about how to update OSs in a timely manner.
That was a major problem with the p990i as well, and it only became useful and able to function as it should after the fifth firmware update. So it would seems SE also has a lot to learn about software development.
This seems to be a general problem with most phone makers - and for this reason Apple’s strategy with iPhone OS X is even more killer since development takes place here rather then at the firmware level, which should be rock solid.
If I was CEO of SE or Nokia, I’d be on the phone to Jobs negotiating licensing of iPhone OS X…
Posted 23 Jun 2007 at 3:00 pm ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
PS, regarding games, I don’t think it’s really an issue for the first iPhone - this is a smart phone for sophisticated users, maybe if they make a cheaper consumer version games will become important, but not right now….
Posted 23 Jun 2007 at 3:12 pm ¶
simon wrote:
I couldn’t agree more about the lack of robustness of phone operating environments. It’s a pain.
I’m not entirely sure why so many phones OS/OEs are so flaky. I guess the development and testing teams are too resource constrained, with market competition requiring companies to keep pushing out large numbers of new devices.
I also suspect that some of these bugs are quite hard (and time-consuming) to track down, because they’re hard to reproduce in testing situations. When you’re dealing with writing software that interacts with hardware at a low level (like on a phone), just reproducing the bugs is often an achievement in itself. It’s really a hard problem.
Let’s see if iPhone is better than Nokia and SE devices in terms of OE stability. Getting a phone OE to be robust out of the box is a pretty damn impressive thing to do.
BTW, has Apple said anything about how it is planning to do OS/OE upgrades for iPhone?
And re: video games… sophisticated users like games too…
Posted 23 Jun 2007 at 3:35 pm ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
Nope, nothing official about software update, but i’d imagine iPhone uses the existing Mac OS X software update, or iPod like updates through iTunes. It’ll basically be a button in the settings that will auto-update over Wifi with a check now option.
New 28 min guided tour infomercial out on Apple site, just seeing now,
http://www.apple.com/
Posted 23 Jun 2007 at 9:50 pm ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
It’s using coverflow, the deep technology in Leopard new Finder, and the one that works with built in share mac cloud computing features of dot mac. So, we probably have a huge dot mac update coming soon…..
Posted 23 Jun 2007 at 10:06 pm ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/06/26/iphone.activated.on.itunes/
http://www.electronista.com/articles/07/06/26/att.iphone.plans/
It’s still not clear if you actually put a sim card in the phone, and if so, can you use it with another, ie like sim free functionality.
From what I gather, you buy the phone for the $499 or whatever it was for 8GB one, then take it home and activate it from iTunes and sign up to a plan. If there’s no sim card involved then it will be impossible to use it with another service?
Otherwise, what’s to stop anyone from buying the phone and selling it on abroad.
Posted 26 Jun 2007 at 4:51 pm ¶