No Excuse

A few days ago, I watched the Steve Jobs keynote introducing the iPhone. As always, it was an impeccable presentation, delivered with the usual quality and style. The iPhone is simply amazing. I have watched the whole event twice and I have enjoyed it like a good movie. It was just awesome.

However, this blog is not about Apple or iPhone, it is about usability. So let us for a moment forget about most of the features iPhone has. Let us forget about the beautiful multi touch display and the wide screen videos. Lets us put aside the full browser and the email, and even widgets. Let's just concentrate on the phone. Just the phone with the most basic stuff. Even without the camera.

Just the phone.

It has occurred to me that there is something strange going on. I mean, Apple, after all is not a cell phone company. Well, of course they have great designers and innovative thinking, but they are not Nokia or Samsung or Motorola.

Yet, amazingly, all of those companies that have the expertise and experience in building phones for nearly two decades have failed to produce something matching the iPhone usability, not even by a large margin.

There is no new technology there. The magnificent scrolling can be done without the multi touch display. Same for the soft keyboard, which has existed for years on all PDAs. The convenient address book with all the details available at a glance as well as the easy interface for putting someone on hold - not to mention the conference call, all of these are not new. A sensor that turns off the display when I hold the phone to my ear is not impossible to imagine either.

The SMS conversation feature, which allows you to see previous messages from the same person in a same thread, is especially painful. After all, instant messaging services were around for a long time now, and technically it is very simple to implement.

It is very strange that such great companies as Nokia and Motorola failed to compete in their own field with an outsider such as Apple even in the most basic of the features of a most basic phone. The usability gap between the iPhone and the existing offering of phones (not just smart phones) is really huge.

They really have no excuse.