The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Well Apple rolled out its new offering yesterday, the iPhone. The press is all over this thing, Apple fans are salivating and the stock price of Apple is up. But to me that is not the REAL story. I have owned multiple "smartphones" over the years, from Windows Mobile, to Symbian OS, to RIM's Blackberry (My current phone is a Pearl). For years now, picking a smartphone is like picking the lesser of two evils. You had to decide what you wanted most in your phone and that based your choice. Blackberries did e-mail, Windows Mobile did MS apps well, and Symbian operated with multiple OSes pretty well. In the end, the UI on the devices were either horribly painful or had a steep learning curve.

Now to me where the Apple iPhone is unique is not that it does everything but Julianne fries, but in the new UI. For 98% of the worlds population not only was a smartphone unnecessary but the pain of learning the hand held device was usually a long and annoying process. I have know people with a high level of computer literacy give up just on the aspect of how long it took to get a level of functionality out of their "smartphones". No way would I ever give one of these things to a non-techie, they would scream in frustration over the interface. Once again, just like the iPod, the user experience and ease of use with the touch interface seems to be the focus. When someone gets frustrated with a product or how hard it is to learn it, the first thing most geeks think is - "how dumb can that user be?". But many times but not all the response should be - "How dumb can the company be who designed this crappy UI?"

We are now seeing companies who have been specialized in one market dipping their toes into multiple areas. If someone would have told me back in 1992 that Microsoft would be in the game console market I would have laughed and called that person a fool. Same thing for Apple and a cell phone. The digital convergence market is beginning to move with the speed of a freight train. People (myself included) want their data whether it be music, movies, TV, documents, web pages, friends, games, etc all at their fingertips. Whether its on their big screen LCD HDTV, or on their cell phone or even on their laptop as well. They want to seamlessly move from one platform to another and not have to worry about compatibility or how hard it is to set up or will it work with this other system. Companies are now see this trend and wanting to give you that option all in house. MS and Sony are a prefect example of this with their Xbox 360's, PS3's. HTPC's, Vista, you name it. Another abstract of this is Google with their applications being web enabled for everything, you do not need to have a specific hardware platform, you just need a web browser on whatever device you are using. In the end its about one stopping point for all your data and a familiar interface.

Just like the iPod where the interface was slick, smooth, very intuitive, and easy to use; if the iPhone can generate that level of customer comfort with the device and is that easy to use then Apple will have a killer product. Instead of going after that 2% market like almost all other smartphone companies that make convergence devices, Apple is going for ALL users. In the end, if your customer can not use your product its not that the end user is stupid its the UI that is broke.