Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

So many things to say about the iPhone. I'll try to stick with a few that haven't been said over and over elsewhere.

First observation: the touchscreen interface has its new poster child. I wrote six months ago that

If touchscreen devices do take off as Strategy Analytics predict, I contend it will happen because they offer the first really discoverable and fun user interfaces for mobile phones. Stylus input needn't be a watered down version of mousing on a PC: it can and should be an experience that is a great improvement over the PC experience.

Apple seems to have been of the same mind. With the wrinkle that they want to liberate us from the stylus too. I said last July that we should "think Minority Report" when we think about the touchscreen and the iPhone's gestural interface is the kind of thing I was getting at. Aside from not having to use the stylus, which is a beautiful thing, I can't tell yet if they've really improved touchscreen usability in the practical sense of getting things done faster and easier. But it sure looks like you're going to be having more fun.

While Apple is working out their exclusive deals with this carrier and that, expect others to roll out media-centric phones with big touchscreens now. Even though those have been only for geeks in the past. That's what we mean when we talk about something becoming an "icon" and this device is about as iconic as they come. A touchstone (almost literally) that others will certainly reference in their own designs.

The iPhone means mobile devices will be less Bill Gates, more Isaac Newton from here on out. The mobile phone is finally waking up to the fact that it's quite a different kind of personal computer: one that not only moves through space, but reacts to the myriad physical forces and conditions it finds there by turning them into input. It knows about movement toward and away from things like your face; It knows up from down; it knows light from dark; it understands the velocity of things that come into contact with it, like the flick of your finger, and its graphical interface responds in ways we'd expect a physical object to react under such a force. All this will raise our expectations about what our mobile devices should know and understand about both the physical environment and our human intentions. That's a really important advancement.

At the same time I wonder if Apple didn't get so carried away with revolutionizing the user interface that they forgot what revolutionaries so often forget: people have ingrained expectations and habits that don't always conform well with sweeping change. Expectations like being able to feel the contour of the call button without taking your eyes off the road, and experiencing its tactile click under your fingers. Habits like blazingly fast text-entry skills using a thumbboard or (outside the US) a 12-key pad. There's something beyond the mere absence of style to the fact that PDA-centric phones that substitute screen taps for buttons have mainly been attractive to geeks. A little more serious attention to haptics would have served the iPhone well. When reviews start to come in I wonder if Jobs' 10 million iPhones in 2008 prediction won't be far wide of the mark.

Still, can there be any question that the iPhone will be the new standard against which every new smartphone will be compared—fairly or otherwise?

Therein lies a problem that could actually set advancements in mobile computing back a few years. If like me (and the folks at Palm whose motto I'm ripping off) you think the future of computing is mobile computing, you probably see the iPhone as the future deferred. There is nothing about it that is going to impress this vision on the masses. The vision is one that sees software as the ultimate means for personalizing our mobile technology, and there was a deafening silence on the subject of developers, developer programs, SDKs or third party software during Steve Jobs' keynote. Instead, Jobs waved the question of installing software off with the vague statement that "it's OSX," which every developer knows is some place between a gross exaggeration and an outright lie. The operating system may have many shared components and APIs with OSX, but if these aren't documented and supported the system is not open and users will not be able to install anything but music, videos, ringtones and stock tickers. If the iPhone was something that Apple hoped would attract a developer ecosystem it would have been mentioned at some point during the 2 1/2 hour presentation. Instead the message was: "everything people need to do with the iPhone we've thought of ourselves." At least one analyst reports that this is precisely Apple's intention. Update: Jobs has now confirmed this himself.

This makes the iPhone a bit of a siren in the Odyssean sense of the word: a lovely, irresistably appealing thing that threatens to bring progress toward the mobile computing Ithaca to a halt. Where imitations of the Treo ushered in a new generation of smartphone users, the iPhone and its inevitable imitators may mean a few more years of the feature phone era.

There is hope for developers and the mobile pilgrims who have seen the light of a rich application ecosystem. Palm, the company that best embodies the spirit of mobile computing, has let slip that this is the year when it raises the curtain on a third act: a new kind of device that is not a PDA or a Treo, but that addresses a need that has yet to be satisfied by either. It's going to have to be good to grab attention away from the iPhone, and Mike Mace summed it up well with this:

I don't know if Palm wanted to make Jeff Hawkins' new product a test of the company's ability to innovate, but like it or not that product is going to be compared intensely to the iPhone, even if they don't attack the same problems or sell to the same people. It's Jeff Hawkins vs. Steve Jobs for the title of mobile visionary.

That should be entertaining.

It should indeed!

Update: After some further thought I'm less concerned about the effect that the iPhone might have on the mobile software market. It might even be a positive, over all. Here's why.