waffle

Stephen Fry, voice of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in same, friend of House and world-renowned gadgethead has made quite a stir with a well-reasoned though (as is usual) lengthy and wandering bit on why the hell manufacturers of mobile phones are so fucking clueless.

Perhaps the best rhetorical question in the entire piece is this:

How could the major players have left a gap in the market so wide that a complete novice in mobile telephony [Apple] could so instantly shame them?

I can think of a few good reasons.

• Mobile phones today are cheap, because they’re made to sell in volume and last for 18 months. The components included are the minimum number people will do with, and the processor isn’t clocked a hertz higher than necessary unless you can make a selling point out of it. It’s a good strategy in that it conserves battery life, and it’s a bad strategy in that it wildly tears away at the life quality of the user.

  You can say what you want about the iPhone, but there’s an extra graphics chip in there to make the transitions run above 4 choppy FPS (yes, hello Sony Ericsson X1, how wonderful of you to drop by), and there’s an extra media decoder chip. The capacity is a few more notches above acceptable, and if there’s an effect in there, you can reasonably expect it to exceed flip-book quality. It feels drastically less cheap.

• Mobile phones today use small screens and keypads. Some phones use bigger screens, but since screens make the device bigger and people want small phones, the only way to make them bigger without making the phone bigger is to either hide away the keypad or make the screen the pointing device. (Clamshell phones mostly have only marginally larger screens.) The two are often combined, but for the longest time these phones would be unbearably thick, which lead to the keypad being left out a lot.

  Pointing can be done with the finger or with a stylus. Pointing demands precision, and a few years back, high-density LCD displays were hard to make, expensive, bad, or all three, so most phones used the stylus, which afforded the necessary precision. On the other hand, using a stylus feels much more legitimate with a user interface that looks a lot more like PC interfaces than the regular soft key-based mobile phone menus. Since people would find regular phones with a stylus interface a chore to use with no particular upside, the decision was made to attack the problem head on and provide software that took advantage of the big screen and the high precision, like better contacts, tasks, calendars and office applications.

  I can recall one phone that took advantage of using a finger instead of a stylus to drive a great interface before 2007, and that was 2003′s N1 from the Swedish player Neonode. N1 took a long time to get to market and only arrived with limited firmware support, with some major features arriving piecemeal afterwards. By this time, the N1 had gotten a reputation for being slow and unstable and was a hard choice to justify. N2 was released in 2007 to little fanfare, and indeed Neonode recently filed for bankruptcy in Sweden.

  I can’t fault the manufacturers for sticking with styluses this long since it seemed to be such a good parlay off of desktop computers. With the concept of windows abstracted away mostly, you could nevertheless reuse your PC knowledge. Radio buttons were still radio buttons. The iPhone has proven to me that using a finger really works if you just start over and design a new interface for it, and that’s what it takes. It’s just that you don’t ever start over or learn from your mistakes in the field of mobile interfaces or OSes, you just tack on a few more modern techniques, more knickknacks and upgrade the CPU and hope it holds together.

The short version of all this is that Apple started by jotting down what a mobile phone should accomplish and what a UI for fingers would feel and look like, built a platform that had enough horsepower to make it enjoyable and spent precious development time not trying to carbon copy the menu structure of every Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung within earshot, but actually building a model that worked for each of the things you do on your phone — well, most, anyway.

The old guard is too afraid of what they’ll find to stop pumping out their 40 variants of their handful of phones to do some introspection, and too blissfully clueless and lost in growth numbers and if-it-ain’t-broke mindsets to realize it. And many of us are too busy going wow at the blinkenlights on one of the new model variants to care. Our fate lies now solely in the hands of bright and awakened in-house mobile phone UI designers taking the boardroom by storm with a two-by-four, Fry’s printed pillars of truth stapled to one end. I will not mourn any casualties in this particular fight.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.