I don't disagree with your assessment of the phone, the "how" of it is what drew a great many of us. But once you get past that, there isn't anything new under the sun as far as smart phone features as far as I'm concerned.
You're transfixed on features, not concepts. I get that. I have worked in network operations and internet security and I can be as technical as they come. But let me use an elementary example to illustrate how there's a disconnect between what people want and what people think they want...
Picture-in-Picture was a feature that for many years could be the deciding factor between two otherwise identical television sets. Or so the manufacturers thought. It would run at least $100 more to have the same set with PIP than without, and for a time people bought into that marketing. But in actual use, very few people used PIP and gradually manufacturers backed off the novelty of that particular feature.
What I was getting at with regard to usability studies is that there's two ways to approach usability. One is to ask people survey questions about features... this is not a good method. The reason it isn't good is because it doesn't get at the heart of what people are trying to do or how they might interact with better-designed solutions.
3G, voice dialing, physical keyboards are examples of means to an end... but they are not ends unto themselves. The trap of "feature whoring" catches not only the semi-technically literate, but the very technical.
The real trick, though, is trying to get an understanding of the core of why people want these features... In the end, what are they trying to DO? The next logical step after that question is to ask if there's a better way to do it. But you can't get there without studying how people interact with technology. If all you do is take a few grunts and make them ask dumb survey questions designed to only affirm the banal status-quo features that your company decided to imitate because they're only incidentally popular and not truly ingenious, then at best you're going to have yet another "me too" product introduction... but never an event of cultural significance.
The truth is that people respond more greatly to concepts than they do features, but they don't always understand the difference unless you SHOW them. This is why Apple Stores get huge traffic... because they design, deploy and market their products as unified concepts, not bundles of bells and whistles. People get moderately excited about bells and whistles. People go ******* over culturally-shifting ideas.
Fundamentally, what does Blackberry possess in design that Newton didn't have in the early 1990's? Then comes iPhone... I'll tell you that I'm so unsurprised by Apple's ability to introduce magnificent designs that I could just as easily have been jaded by iPhone, but my immediate reaction to the product was, "This is the first device of any kind that makes me feel that I am really living in the 21st century."
The design, and I don't mean the bells and whistles but the overall user experience as a conglomeration of UI design, software intuitiveness, industrial design of the hardware, the entire package... is so far ahead of anything RIM or Palm have ever come up with. But it didn't end there. When I discovered how ridiculously simple the activation process was, and how wonderfully designed the iTunes integration is for content management and firmware updates, I knew the bar had been raised significantly. And the executives of other device manufacturers know it, too. In more than one instance insiders have elucidated that other execs are genuinely scared, because every time Apple does something on this scale, the competitors whether they like it or not have to get off their duff and produce something of a higher order because customers now KNOW that this kind of user experience exists.
If you keep feeding them garbage, they'll eat it, but as soon as one competitor feeds them something better, they'll start demanding that.
Incidentally, if you've ever used one of the newer BlackBerrys, you know that navigation is incredibly easy. Probably the best UI of any non-iPhone.
I did, and I used the Treo as well... and I wanted to throw them both through the window. But the problem is that the average person might get frustrated and not know how to articulate exactly the cause of their frustration. But I could recognize what frustrated me and what might immediately frustrate any other user...
Let me use one example in particular:
Aside from the trackball that makes this device annoying, having to sequentially scroll through icons, you have many similar icons and what else do you notice? Perhaps having thought that a narrow color palette on this screen would be more pleasing to the eye, RIM created a mess because now you've got a bunch of icons that are not immediately discernible. If this is the "best" non-iPhone UI the market has to offer, that is a horrible state of affairs.
I think my comment stands up - most folks who are impressed by the features aren't that familiar with smartphones.
I still think you're generalizing on scant evidence... You have made some remarks about how you think other smartphones are advanced, but haven't really demonstrated the experience level of the average iPhone user. To wit, the iPhone is an expensive device and I'd suspect that their target demographic is comprised of quite a few people who have had $200 and $300 and $400 smartphones. I'm not going to unabashedly claim that it is, without harder data, but I think you're jumping to conclusions.
And let's be honest - there is some lacking with the features the iPhone does have in that regard. No To Do list, no copy/paste, no ability to mass delete email.
What part of "software update" did you not understand?
Here again we are talking at cross purposes... You want to think about only the present, and not the potential. The fact is that the other smartphones have limited potential because they are bound tightly to an inferior OS and inferior physical design that allows for only so many interface configurations and a much more limited user experience.
WHEN iPhone integrates some of these other features you mention, imagine how much more elegantly and purposefully designed they will be. I showed a Blackberry owner how I delete individual e-mails (finger-swipe, click, gone) and he was simply blown away.
I had a friend email me his contact info and then realized opening it up on the phone was useless because I had no way of transferring the data.
And I can't get my microwave to read my e-mail... what is your point? That one type of device has a standard different from another? Welcome to the world of consumer electronics. Try opening a Pages document in Word. Now try opening a Word document in Pages... funny, it works this way.
This is a minor hurdle that also misses the larger UI integration. Consider that I can look up a doctor's office on the map, add his location, phone number, name, etc. in one command to my contacts list, and then call him to schedule an appointment. Note also that any phone number someone e-mails me shows up as a hyperlink that I can directly call from... Probably true that other smartphones have this but I'd be curious to see how clunky their implementation is. I know that when I click a phone number in an email I am asked if I want to call and then instantly taken to the very un-cluttered call screen. I also know that when another call comes in, I can either conference or switch to it without being confused because the 160ppi screen shows buttons with plain english descriptions of what the hell they do. No static nested menus to figure out, everything is contextual to the situation.
Something like that isn't a dealbreaker, but it's not a tiny thing either.
Neither is visual voicemail... something your smartphone doesn't have. I was using this kind of concept in 1997 when I worked for Lucent Technologies. The implementation was horrible, bogged down heavily by its dependence on a Windows PC and very poorly coded software... But the concept was the same as iPhone's Visual Voicemail. It was the Intuity Message Manager (I called it "Message Mangler" because it was so painful to use) designed for the Definity G3 series PBX. Now instead of having an entire PBX system with a dedicated blade for Message Mangler, iPhone does it all elegantly in one small package. Once you try it you'll wonder why the hell you ever accepted anything less.
The same applies for most of the other concepts that have been around but are better integrated and better implemented in the iPhone than in any other device I've seen. I know from my own experience developing web interfaces that people complain up down left and right when you ignore usability in favor of sheer volume of bells and whistles.
Again... I will say it a million times if I have to... There is a difference between what a customer wants, and what they are willing to settle for. But if you really want to revolutionize the market and create an event of culturally-impacting significance, you have to get to the heart of what they really desire and can be passionate about. People are more vocal about what they don't like than what they do like... So when you cram something with three-hundred mediocre features, you exponentially increase the chance of product failure... but do one, two or three things brilliantly and people will line up just to drool at your product.
I am a pragmatic person... but consider that even the softness of the Mac OS user interface, the use of 128-bit icons, drop shadows and alpha channels, makes for an experience that is much more like looking at a nicely printed page than looking at the jagged aliasing of a Windows screen which after eight hours a day, five days a week, is an uncomfortable experience. Now consider how much more productive I can be if I'm not experiencing eye-strain? That's form serving function for you.
Apple is good at one thing in particular... making the technology and computing transparent to the user so the user can focus on the doing and creating. It's not a coincidence that they removed "Computer" from their company name... Not because they are going to stop focusing on computers, but because so much of what they have done has made the "computing" transparent to the point where "computer" is no longer a useful word to describe such devices. At its core, iPhone IS a computer... but like none ever before. Its interface is something on the order of the 24th Century tri-corders in Star Trek: The Next Generation... except a lot more elegant and more compact. And yes, according to a very recent article, doctors are already using the device to access medical databases to assist them on the job in their diagnoses.
As a footnote... "Multitasking" is a word that gets thrown around a lot in the workplace... and when people bring it up I say, "Oh, you mean... Why do one thing right when you can do fifteen things wrong in the same amount of time?" Keep that in mind next time you extol the virtues of umpteen features that are in practice a pain in the ass to use.
In fact, they also have high speed internet, 5 megapixel cameras, and built-in GPS. Not trying to poo on your post. It just seems like a lot of people aren't aware that the iphone isn't the first device that can do the things you mentioned. It's just the first that happens do them really well.
