Remember in high school when you didn’t bother to do any research and just made a bunch of stuff up? (well, maybe not you, but some of us anyway) Seems this analyst didn’t quite graduate to the next level…

The bummer is the idea of an Apple phone is really appealing. Especially if like me you feel that in spite of some improvements that mobile UI, particularly for anything involving multiple screen or input of data by hand, is woefully lacking and there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of progress being made to fix the problems.

Surely the form factor has some fairly significant inherent limitations but in recent years people have shown at least some willingness to try alternative form factors so long as they make sense. Recently I had one of the Nokia “Lipstick” phones in my hands- this is the phone with no keypad just a dial like an iPod in fact. Everyone says that this phone is very difficult to use because the set-up is so different from what we’re used to, however in less then a minute I found that using that phone for T9 input vastly superior to T9 input using a conventional keypad. While I agree that you do need (at least in this iteration) to look at the display since the tactile response doesn’t differentiate one letter or number to the next this could easily be remedied with audible cues.

My point? It clearly is possible to dramatically improve the UI of mobile devices if only we have (or comapnies) have the courage to be really and possibly radically different. IMO this is why the potential for a MAC phone UI is so intriguing. MAC fans as you know are rabid. They will at least TRY something the company puts out and this is what has the potential to be a change inflection point in mobile UI. If Nokia (as they just did) introduce something dramatically different people pan it without giving it a real honest test. Apple zealots will test it to death proving to themselves that it does or doesn’t work.

Of course as the best UI designers on the planet, I don’t imagine that the Apple guys will realease crap either. The issue is whether they believe that they can do something with enough of an improvement that it is worthy of the Apple name.

I for one am hopeful and excited about the prospects. If the Apple UI is very differnt AND better it will open the door to other companies doing more (and better) innovative designs of their own and hopefully the success of an Apple device will open the minds of a broader base of consumers that not all phones have to look like a Razr (one of my most-hated designs) to be a cool phone.

Oliver Starr
http://mobilecrunch.com