Macopinion

iPhone Competitors

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

A key thought hit me -- one of many -- during Steve Jobs' remarkable Macworld keynote address last week: this iPhone thing is going to be impossible to clone!

A week later and people are already talking about competitors stealing Apple's grand ideas (a physically similar LG Phone already exists, in fact), but I stand by my original impulse.

Apple's iPhone is much more than an ordinary cell phone. It's got amazing hardware packed into a slender case scarcely thicker than the screen. It's a computer with the world's most sophisticated operating system at its core. It's got a breakthrough, science fiction-like touch interface that's patented up the wazoo. It incorporates the world's best-selling media player, the iPod, and is compatible with thousands of iPod accessories as well as the iTunes Store and the easy-to-use iTunes software for syncing.

Is there another company on the planet that can match that? Not even close!

Nokia, Motorolla, Sony/Ericson and other cell phone makers know something about electronics, and their hardware designs are occasionally impressive, but they all suck at software. The interfaces for their phones are horrible, butt ugly, and illogical. They slap new features on their phones as often as you and I change clothes, but it's merely cosmetic: functionality is lost among glitz and flash.

There are the smartphone companies: Palm with their Treo line and RIM with their Blackberry. Surely these guys know something about software!

Well, not really. Palm's stuck on their stylus requirement, and the Palm OS really hasn't improved much since it debuted. Syncing is still way too complicated, and complimentary Palm desktop software is all over the place, quality-wise, if it exists at all. Interfaces for Palm apps are inconsistent and confusing, though software is plentiful. But the newest Treos run Windows Mobile instead of Palm OS -- what's up with that?

I've never used a Blackberry, but from what I've heard they're either the best thing ever if you're a geek, or an expensive, overly complicated toy if you're not.

Both companies love their miniature embedded QWERTY keyboards, of course. But I bet just seeing those tiny keyboards turns off far more people than they attract. Even if you think you want a keyboard on your phone, the idea that you can actually type more than a word on such a keyboard is intimidating. Some people love them, but I agree with Apple that for handhelds, the future's virtual keyboards.

None of these companies really do media right: my Palm's picky about the images it will display and it's very slow for high resolution photos. Music is passable, but again it feels like a kludge: if I switch to a different app while music is playing, I get tons of skips. Don't even get me started with video.

But the big thing is that none of these competitors do full integration properly. Apple's got integration down with iPod, iTunes desktop software, and the iTunes Store. It's a tested system, with millions of users, and provides the key ease-of-use people want in their technology.

Apple knows which tasks are best left for the desktop. For instance, media and content management. An iPhone is designed to let you do enough things to be useful but not so much that it requires extra complication in a handheld device. Other makers continually forget this and throw in feature after feature bogging the whole system down and making the device so complicated to use only computer geeks can handle it.

Getting this balance of access versus power is critical; Apple's done it well with iPods and I'd predict they'll do it well with the iPhone. Other manufacturers will have a tough time being competitive here.

No one out there has user interface design experience to compare with Apple (most existing GUIs, including Palm and Windows, are cheap knockoffs of what Apple started). No one has hardware and software integration like Apple. No one has a dominate media platform like iTunes and iPod to leap from. And no one has a rich, deep foundation Mac OS X to build upon.

The only company that could possibly compete against the iPhone would be Microsoft: dominate on the desktop, with "synergy" with their Xbox gaming platform and already shipping Windows Mobile, they theoretically have the power to combat Apple. But Microsoft doesn't do hardware. For an integrated device, a hardware partnership just does not work. Hardware and software must work together -- just compare how the iPhone intelligently auto-rotates when you turn it compared to the Zune's forced mode rotation (certain media is only viewable in certain orientations).

Further, Microsoft has never had a true success outside of its operating systems monopoly (Xbox is most widely cited as successful, but it still loses money and its pathetic sales are dwarfed by iPod and even the ancient Playstation 2).

And of course the miserable failure of the Zune, despite massive promotion and push by Microsoft, shows that not even the Redmond behemoth can sell the wrong product.

Granted people will try. Claims will be made. "Our touch screen is just like the iPhone!" "Our Ultra-Touch is even better than iPhone!"

But it will all just be smoke. In five years no one has managed to even touch the iPod. The old iPod is rather primitive and simple to copy compared to the iPhone. Yet no one successfully duplicated the iPod, though many claimed and tried (Zune being the latest "zucker" to fail).

And the iPod just leapt five years further ahead.

So relax when you hear stories of iPhone clones, "better" iPhones from someone else, or copycat claims. Unless Apple licenses the technology, no one else will be producing iPhones for a long time. It's just not going to happen.

macopinion@designwrite.com