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Apple iPhone
Form vs. Function
There’s the classic dichotomy of form vs. function. Something might look good but does not work well, for instance, a designer toaster oven. There are however cases where the line of demarcation blurs. The form becomes part of the function. Case in point, the OS X UI, its appearance, which is for the most part coherent, consistent, and well thought-out, help contributes to its ease-of-use and thus enhancing its function.
Hardly Innovative
There’s nothing innovative about what the iPhone does. You still talk to people speaking the same language, you still write sms/emails using the same alphabet, you take, send, and browse pictures of the same objects. You still watch the same movie star acting in the same roles and story. There’s nothing different in substance.
Definitely Revolutionary
Where it does stand out is how it goes by doing those same things we have come to expect from our mobile devices. It’d take me probably 4000 words and more to document how well executed and designed the iPhone is, on prima facie evidence alone. I’ll just crudely bring up a few examples.
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First, the iChat dialogue interface for SMS. This might seem trivial but it’s quite significant to those of us who rely on text for a lot of our everyday business and recreational uses. With that interface, there’s a sense of history and continuity, which is only sensible because you are having a dialog! Not separate, individual voice message. It really baffles me how something that’s seemingly so obvious has escaped so many of the big phone companies.
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Second, the incredibly dynamic interface. By relying on touch and doing away with physical push buttons altogether, the screen allows Apple to construct a highly intuitive interface for control. Granted, there are other PDAs and Smart phones which already have the same feature. But without the sense and understanding of how a user would best like to receive information and control, it’d be nowhere as effective as the iPhone’s. It’s obvious that without form, there’d be no function. I’m inclined to say that, without a good and effective form, there’d be no function, either.
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The third, and probably last for now, feature I want to bring up is the “zooming”. One of the biggest hinderance to doing things on your phone/PDA is the small screen. Sure you can browse the web, check email, and look at pictures. But what good does it do when you can only see one eigth of the page, one quarter of the email, and a really scaled down picture? There needs to be a way to adjust how much you want to see on a fly. On many on said devices, they allow you to zoom into the object and look closer but, as far as i know, none allows you to zoom out. Even if they do, it’s cumbersome to get it to zoom out let alone to zoom back in.
The way the iPhone screen is constructed allow you to use your finger and gesture to communicate to the device that you want to scroll, zoom in, and out all in fractions of a second. This is where good form allows much better and efficient performance of its function.
2008
Steve Jobs says the iPhone will be released in Asia in 2008. It’s a quite a bit behind European and North American releases. But in the end, it works out pretty well for me. My beloved Nokia 6280 will be almost 2 years old then and be fit for semi-retirement. Time to start saving US$50 a month.
