“It has been nearly a year since Apple Inc. launched the elegant and easy-to-use iPhone. Since then, our perceptions on how we can use a mobile phone have changed,” Eric Benderoff reports for The Chicago Tribune. “But the essential lesson of the iPhone has yet to be learned: The magic is in the simplicity of using Apple’s software.”
“That became abundantly clear as I wrestled with two new touch-based phones. They have their merits but are no threat to what Apple offers,” Benderoff reports.
“The LG Vu and Verizon’s XV6900 (an, ahem, attention-grabbing name; another missed lesson) are both handsome from a hardware standpoint… But based on usability, they are so far behind what Apple achieved that it seems unfair to even make a comparison,” Benderoff reports.
“Essentially, the one thing these phones have in common with the iPhone is touch. And even that needs work,” Benderoff reports.
MacDailyNews Take: Disappointingly, Benderoff fails to make the distinction between uni-touch (which all fake iPhones employ) and multi-touch (iPhone). That’s a major difference and ignoring it is what the iPhone-fakers rely upon; that’s why you see Verizon ads screaming “touch” in the U.S., but the “touch” they offer is rudimentary at best and, as Benderoff does clearly state, can’t compete with iPhone.
Benderoff continues, “Perhaps the next few efforts at a touch-screen phone, including Sprint’s Instinct, will provide the fun and function Apple got right in its first effort. So far, if someone asked me to suggest a cool touch phone, there’s still only one worth buying.”
MacDailyNews Take: Again, it’s not touch that’s the issue; it’s Multi-Touch that’s helps set iPhone apart (along with obsessive attention to detail throughout the UI and apps vs. competitors’ attention only to making the home screen look as much like an iPhone as possible and ignoring the rest of the user interface and software.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Peter T. in Oak Park” for the heads up.]
Mobile Safari would not be usable without multi touch, it’s the ability to easily zoom in and out of defined points in a web page which makes the small screen work so flawlessly for web browsing.
There are likely many other aspects to multi touch which would not work with “unitouch” screens. A very common example is how you can touch on the alternate symbol button in the bottom corner and drag your finger to a punctuation mark and let go and it flips back to letters after typing out a period or comma, etc. This is so natural that it makes typing on the touch keypad a breeze and I cannot imagine an iPhone without this. I do not think such a “click and drag” feature would be possible without a multi touch screen.
Multi Touch is a very big part of what makes the iPhone tower over other imitators. But it certainly is not the only thing.
If iPhone is THAT great (5 years ahead of other vendors per Steve Jobs), then how come there are only 100k sold phones in Germany in 6 months?
one aspect of multi-touch that people seem to be missing: applications on the iPhone. let’s not forget that third-party applications are coming soon, and may bring new uses for multi-touch with them. we’ve already seen demos of new uses for the iPhone’s accelerometer.
what about a simple puzzle game where two fingers are used to rotate pieces? what about a two-finger swipe in an application that acts as a “modifer key”? or two fingers to select a range of text? Apple’s laid the groundwork for some interesting methods of input that don’t require slapping more buttons on the device.
the iPhone has been about paving the way for the future all along. journalists and bloggers alike have largely failed to grasp this.
@Windowzfan: you’re right, that is odd considering how quick Germans are to embrace and adopt technologies coming out of non-German countries.
/sarcasm
“…Because it doesn’t have a tactile keyboard…”
Everyone bitched about no keyboard when the iphone was first released. Now every phone maker is scrambling to create virtual keyboards for their phones!!
When apple got rid of the floppy drive, everyone bitched and complained.
Why does the competition rip off the very thing they complain about?
The iPhone is overpriced in Germany now (399 Euro!) Apple should take advantage of the crappy dollar and lower the price. And 3G is much more important in Germany since there is actually widespread coverage.
I think everything will change once the SDK and 3G phone come online, though.
Does Germany tax the iPhone as a radio receiving device?
Don’t get me wrong; multi-touch is cool, and handy, and advances UI state of the art. But it’s not what makes the iPhone, at least not currently.
Think about it – how much time do you really spend pinch-zooming? (which if I’m not mistaken is the one and only current iPhone multi-touch gesture).
What puts the iPhone’s touch interface at a level of sophistication way above all others is the support for gestures — most of them decidedly uni-touch — like flick-scrolling, swipe-delete, and so on.
@Windozfan,
As I’ve said before… it’s not surprising that a 2G cell phone sold poorly in Germany that has advanced way beyond that. What IS surprising is that regardless of an antiquated cell protocol Apple has has been able to still sell 100,000 iPhones to Germans willing to take second-best cell service. I think this bodes well for a 3G iPhone. No worries here.
the samsung instinct isn’t going to have windows mobile. it’s samsung’s own UI. and i hope for iphone’s sake they come up with a faster connection than 3g because the instinct will have rev-a which is way faster than 3g. plus streaming video, live navigation gps,on demand tv, streaming radio just to start, etc.