No, no, not another post referencing the iPhone’s AppStore – and in any case, Nokia for one can’t be accused of going all me too on that front, since every Nokia smartphone since 2005 has had a ‘Download!’ on-device store (just not a very successful one) – what I’d like to focus on here are the innovations in the iPhone’s form factor and how Nokia and others are responding.
Cast your mind back, if you will, to the momentus MacWorld keynote at the start of 2007 in which Steve Jobs announced the iPhone to the world. The three main points which stuck in my mind about Apple’s new creation were:
- The way in which the ‘too much plastic’ problem was overcome. Now, full-screen PDAs had been with us for years, and some Windows Mobile smartphones were just that – full-screen PDAs with a phone tacked on. But Apple brought us a full-screen, purpose-built phone that aimed to compete with the ‘plastic-ridden’ qwerty-keyboarded smartphones at their own game, but without a physical keyboard.
- Finger touch was now OK. After years of everyone saying ‘Don’t touch your screen, you’ll get it dirty/greasy’, it’s now not only OK, but indeed the only way to interact with your device. Radical.
- The iPhone interface, seamless from top to bottom, doing away with menus and finger-friendly throughout. Purpose-built, you might say, even though in reality it sits on top of a version of Mac OS X.
