The Genesis of the iPhone

Time Magazine has an article on Apple's New Calling:

Apple's new iPhone could do to the cell phone market what the iPod did to the portable music player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority. This is unfortunate for anybody else who makes cell phones, but it's good news for those of us who use them.

Jobs had just led Apple on a triumphant rampage through a new market sector, portable music players, and he was looking around for more technology to conquer. Cell phones are perfect because even Grandma has one: consumers bought nearly a billion of them last year. Break off just 1% of that and you can buy yourself a lot of black turtlenecks.

Cell phones do all kinds of stuff—calling, text messaging, Web browsing, contact management, music playback, photos and video—but they do it very badly, by forcing you to press lots of tiny buttons, navigate diverse heterogeneous interfaces and squint at a tiny screen.

The iPhone is a typical piece of Ive design: an austere, abstract, platonic-looking form that somehow also manages to feel warm and organic and ergonomic. Unlike my phone.

Now pick it up and make a call. A big friendly icon appears on that huge screen. Say a second call comes in while you're talking. Another icon appears. Tap that second icon and you switch to the second call. Tap the big “merge calls” icon and you've got a three-way conference call. Pleasantly simple.

Another example: voicemail. Until now you've had to grope through your v-mail by ear, blindly, like an eyeless cave-creature. On the iPhone you see all your messages laid out visually, onscreen, labeled by caller. If you want to hear one, you touch it. Done.

Now try a text message: Instead of jumbling them all together in your in-box, iPhone arranges your texts by recipient, as threaded conversations made of little jewel-like bubbles. And instead of “typing” on a four-by-four number keypad, you get a full, usable QWERTY keyboard. You will never again have to hit the 7 key four times to type a letter S.

The iPhone breaks two basic axioms of consumer technology. One, when you take an application and put it on a phone, that application must be reduced to a crippled and annoying version of itself. Two, when you take two devices—such as an iPod and a phone—and squish them into one, both devices must necessarily become lamer versions of themselves.

Two axioms Apple has broken indeed!

Read the whole thing!

If Apple delivers on making this as good as it sounds, they may just indeed do for cell phones what the iPod did for MP3 players. We can only hope they pull it off.

If nothing else, this is pushing the boundaries of the perception of the possible, raising the bar for other cell phone manufacturers and the expectations of consumers. This is good news for the future!

(HT Engadget)