On Mon, 25 Jun 2007 10:19:25 -0700, ZnU wrote
(in article <znu-D7C0D6.13192525062007@individual.net>):

> In article <1182766023.944929.238320@j4g2000prf.googlegroups. com>,
> zeez <UltimaUW@excite.com> wrote:
>
>> On Jun 24, 6:09 pm, justincas...@gmail.com (Justin) wrote:
>>> Rocky Mountain News
>>>
>>> Apple's iPhone top choice to buy, survey shows
>>> By Bloomberg News
>>> June 23, 2007
>>>
>>> Apple Inc.'s iPhone was a top choice in a survey of people who plan to buy
>>> an advanced mobile phone in the next three months, a sign the new device
>>> may take market share from rivals.
>>>
>>
>> Lemme guess....the status seekers, right?
>
> Have you watched the videos of the iPhone in use? It provides by far the
> best user experience of any handset on the market. As a desktop
> operating system developer, Apple brings far more to the table on this
> front than companies which have previously only designed UI for
> simplistic embedded devices.
>
> I'm using a four year-old Nokia Series 60 phone simply because I don't
> particularly consider anything I've seen recently to constitute much of
> an upgrade. I'll probably be buying an iPhone.
>
> The people who sit around counting the number of bullet points on spec
> sheets are seriously missing the point, just as they did with the iPod.
>
> Apple's major recent successes practically all revolve around taking
> technologies that are out there, but that regular consumers don't quite
> get, into mass market technologies. They played a fairly large role in
> doing this with WiFi, and they did it with the iPod. Apple didn't do
> anything in these instances that was *technically* much different from
> what others were doing. What they did was package the technology to make
> it palatable to regular people, and create a use case for it that
> regular people understood.
>
> They're now looking to do the same thing in the smart phone market.
> Currently these phones appeal to business types and tech-heads. Apple is
> going to make one that works for the iPod demographic.
>
> It's really dangerous to underestimate Apple here. To lift from a post I
> made to CSMA a couple of weeks back:
>
> At first glance, in this market, it appears that Apple is going up
> against well entrenched, serious competitors. Upon further examination,
> however, one realizes that most of the players in this space are,
> frankly, amateurs compared with Apple.
>
> Yes, I'm completely serious. Apple's established competitors in the
> cell phone market (or the vendors they license software from) mostly
> have backgrounds building simple embedded software systems for very
> limited devices. A company that has been developing operating systems
> for desktop computers for a few decades is in a far better position to
> tackle the challenges of building a real platform for today's mobile
> devices, which are no longer all that limited.
>
> Does anyone really see Nokia or Motorola or even Palm developing a
> platform that can match OS X? Creating and maintaining a desktop-class
> OS is not at all trivial. None of Apple's competitors really has any
> serious experience with it except for Microsoft, and Microsoft has its
> own problems.
>
> [snip]
>
>

Thing is, that it's about time somebody who KNOWS how to do a user interface
designed a phone. I have a very simple Motorola V190. It's just a phone. No
music player, no built-in camera, not even bluetooth. It is without a doubt
the most illogically laid-out interface I've ever seen (who ever designed it
must been on the Windows GUI design team). Its almost impossible to find
anything in its menus and when you do, they are so illogically placed that
you'll never remember where they are and every time you want to do "that"
again, you've got to spend many minutes searching for it. Heck, I can't even
find where they've hidden the phone's own number. I have to turn it off and
back on again any time I need to note the phone's number, because forget
finding it in the phone's setup menus even though it IS there. David Pogue's
TV show "Its all Geek to Me" on Discovery Science Channel did an episode on
cell phones. From the people he encountered on the street, I get the idea
that most phones are intrinsically user hostile.