What is it about Apple’s IPhone that has stopped other companies following suit and developing their own intuitive user interfaces, multitouch screens and perhaps even going further still with yet to be announced innovative ways to interact with a small hand held phone? Come to think of it, why did it take Apple to come up with this interface, why didn’t the other manufacturers come out with it years ago?
Perhaps now that eighteen months have gone by since the IPhone was unwrapped, these giant multinational corporations can offer alternatives? Maybe the Nokia N95, the Sony Ericsson W960, the LG LGKS20, the HTC Touch, Palm Centro….
Although all of these phones are feature rich, they don’t concentrate on improving the user interface. They either regurgitate old technology or they poorly mimic Apple’s Mobile OS X.
We can’t even say that Apple’s IPhone is so far ahead of the competition that it impossible for them to catch up. The IPhone has some serious weaknesses, including Bluetooth support, below standard speakers, no MMS, and a camera that’s worthless in low light. The existing mobile manufactuers are all far ahead of Apple in these regards, and could spend more time concentrating on a better user interface, than pumping out ever more rich features on a device thats hard to navigate.
Could it be the old guard have become bogged down with layers of decision clogging, stopping creative people from leading their companies? Perhaps they don’t feel threatened enough by a poxy 5 million units? After all, Sony Ericsson Sold 100 million handsets in 2007, and Nokia sold 1.14 Billion.
Once Nokia was responsible for designing the most intuitive user friendly mobile interface, and was copied by all and sundry, but in the early 21st Century they lost much of that creativity. It took Apple to re-energize a market that wanted us to squint at web pages in WAP formats, and buried the calculator application under folders like extras.
With Nokia’s sales around 51 Billion EUR in 2007, the most we can hope for from them is the N96, which although packed with features, continues using a tired user interface. After all what is the use to have a podcasting feature installed as a default if 90% of your consumers never use it, surely that just clogs up the interface. Provide it as an addition but don’t force on us.
So Why can’t you IPhone? Because the competition has structured their business to cut out risk. Much like Microsoft’s corporately conservative strategy, it allows them to make profits with relatively low risk. The downside is that it reduces their capacity for innovation. They can aquire companies that have innovated, rebrand and rollout the inovative technology themselves, but they cannot produce the innovation themselves, because it gets squashed by the decision makers keen to keep the risks, and costs low.
Perhaps the nature of Steve Jobs, emboldens Apple to take on more risk than its competition. Perhaps the nature of its competition does not. What ever happens, i’m looking forward to the company that creates a better user interface than the IPhone. Although at this rate, it might be left up to Apple.
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