Years ago I would go to conferences and people would hold up their Palm and lecture us on why it worked, the economy of means, the elegance. Time passed and the same people - usually people who had not actually participated in the design process of the particular device - would hold up an Ipod and preach the wonders of the clickwheel and how it had revolutionized design on the order of bread slicers or fishnet hose.



That they usually missed the point was irrelevant. The value of the Palm was that it was much smaller than a Newton, and much faster because Palm asked people what they actually used. And both the Palm & the Ipod had coherent software interfaces that easily synced the stuff on your desktop machine. That the Ipod made having many gigabytes of purloined music sort of marginally legitimate was not trivial, either.

So I wanted to get in on the ground floor of helping Apple hype the Ipod phone, because I am predicting that this will save me a significant amount in conference fees over the next two years.

And it is not like I am above the seductive power of pop culture here. I too was reading the real time blogs from Macworld while Steve Jobs was unveiling it. Oh yeah, it is cool, and half of the people on my block have one.

But what it makes such a big splash is a study in contrasts, and how the competition failed to develop and market something that people can feel affection for. Much less use easily. Or perhaps they are related.

The current crop of cellphones are junk. There are so many difficult to use features that the cellphone manufacturers market a special line of simple phones for the very young, very old or especially annoyed. These phones have larger buttons and very few features. The emphasis is on talking to people, unusual for a phone I guess.

And the phone companies are completely oblivious to this resistance. Because of the way that cell phones are sold, really as a token of the extortionist contract with the service provider, there is a critical gap that occurs between manufacturer & user. The design of the phones is passed on as a feature list and separated from everything else in the users existence or context. An elaborate & extensively discussed system to create a broken wheel.

The worst thing about the current phones - and don’t get me wrong, Razors look cool and have great ads - is that if you lose it your numbers and all of the phone specific programming is gone. Unless you have a Trio or a Blackberry, you are just out of luck. But even Trio’s and Blackberries don’t have a good mp3/mp4 implementation. Much less the overwhelming cultural currency [read: cool] of the Ipod.

The Ipod advantage in both cases is it’s connection to the desktop.

For phone numbers, it leverages a much more powerful interface; your desktop through any Vcard compliant program. So you have all of your email addresses on the phone; and backed up. Think weeks of texting saved. Imagine what you will do with that time.

In terms of features, the new phone is configurable. Which means, to a luddite like me, that you can turn most of them off. Thankyouverymuch!



Some criticize the implementation of OSX on a phone. They feel that it is a heavyweight solution to the problem. But in fact it is a very demanding problem that is already spawning imitators as quickly as ipod cases. I am certainly willing to sacrifice a few songs for a usable interface! Features you can easily discover how to use are worth quite a bit more to me than ones that mystify & annoy me.

But the advantage to Apple is that it capitalizes on three years of software development of their OSX desktop widgets. And all of the development that has gone into the Ipod, Itunes content providers & the basic UI.

Not having to carry around my Ipod and my phone is probably the least of the advantages. Waiting until all the early adopters buy it and the price falls will be the hard part. But there is always the satisfaction of being patient enough to see what they add in generation 2; Apple has always been the most sublime tease of iterative marketing.