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Last week, when the iPhone was released in the UK, my housemate James came home beaming with delight and cradling Apple’s shiny new toy, probably the most influential product release of 2007. Since then I have had a few opportunities to play with it too. It’s certainly nice.

But about everyone and anyone has written a review of it already, and there is no need for me to add yet another one. Still, there’s something special about it. If I mention the words ‘mobile’ and ‘user experience’ to anybody in conversation, I almost inevitably get ‘iPhone’ back. Why?

“First Apple made the hype, and released the hype as a product. Then they released the iPhone as the follow-up product.”

– Charles McCathieNevile (Opera Software) at FoM2007

Maybe the right question should not be why the iPhone is so good, but rather why the handsets of much more established manufacturers are so bad (in some respects, notably usability). Some interesting insight came from Tom Hume and Marek Pawlowski on a FoM2007 panel discussion:

• The mobile handset industry has a structural problem. The manufacturers are very focused on R&D and on features, and within a single company there may actually be different groups advocating different technologies and features, all competing to be integrated into the next line of handsets. The design process is fundamentally bottom-up, rather than starting from high-level requirements and working down towards the features. The result is a user experience which consists of a bundle of fairly detached features, and is not at all consistent or well structured.
• Another problem with handset manufacturers is that they are extremely risk-adverse. This is because managers’ bonuses are calculated based on the number of defective handsets returned to the manufacturer — a direct incentive to make their products robust and reliable. So far it sounds good. The problem is that there are certain features which carry a higher risk, but have potentially huge benefit — the most notable one being automatic software updates — and these features get omitted too. Currently it is still the case with most handsets that once it has left the factory, its software is never updated. As phone software begins to become extremely complicated and time to market is extremely short, major bugs in the software are inevitable. And without software updates, those bugs will only be removed if you manually update the firmware (which hardly anybody does), or when you get a new phone.
• Finally, handset manufacturers don’t usually have their own retail (or have you seen a Nokia store anywhere?). They sell through the mobile operators, and entrust the sales process to people completely outside their control. Moreover, since they don’t have much direct contact with consumers, they get hardly any useful feedback about their products which could feed back into the design cycle. Instead, they just continue to produce more and more phones based largely on speculation of what people actually want.

All three points are different with Apple. The user experience is clearly the most important part of their design, and features are secondary. They regularly update the software, and in fact they have already released a number of improvements which would have never reached the previously shipped devices without this update facility. And they have their own shops, in fact a whole fan base which they actively nurture — what better way to learn how to improve the next version?

And the model clearly works. The iPhone really is a pleasure to use, the experience is consistent and well thought out — it simply feels right.

But what will its longer-term effects be?

The iPhone is just one product, and even if Apple’s highly optimistic sales forecasts were to come true, they would still have less than one per cent market share. I think that the true value of the iPhone lies not in itself, but in the knock-on effects which it is having on the whole mobile ecosystem:

• It has raised the bar in terms of design and usability, and other manufacturers will be rushing to improve their own designs similarly. (For example, Nokia announced a similar touch screen user interface only a few weeks ago.)
• It is helping enormously to raise awareness for the mobile internet — people are beginning to see the potential in having internet and web access on the go.

These effects are both rather good, and although I probably won’t be getting an iPhone myself anytime soon, I think these are very good developments.

On Wednesday I went to the Future of Mobile conference in London. It was an exciting event — lots of people had high hopes, in particular for the future of data services on mobile devices (i.e. the internet). Some of my main take-home messages were:

• The mobile market is HUGE. Seriously. Billions of people worldwide have mobile phones, and more people worldwide access the web from mobile devices than from desktop or laptop computers. By 2010, half the world’s population is expected to be subscribed to the mobile web. A lot of this is driven by developing countries, where mobile is a far better solution for communication than a fixed-line telephone infrastructure. But it is also a growing trend in the developed world.
• A great user experience is absolutely essential if you want to get people to use your services mobile. The mobile user’s attention is extremely limited: unlike on a computer or a television, where people are more likely to patiently try to come to terms with bad usability, mobile users have plenty of other things to do. If they can’t immediately and very quickly find or achieve what they want, they are gone immediately. Mobile content must therefore be extremely clearly and intelligently structured, presented in an engaging way, glanceable, simple, and be fluid to interact with.
• Communication is key. People want to talk, create, share, explore — not just passively consume. A mobile is always with you it, it where your life is happening, it is a point of creation and lies in a rich context. The future possiblities for the social use of mobiles is something we can only just begin to envisage.

Amongst the speakers, possibly the most keenly awaited was David Burke of Google, who was the first to present Google’s new Android platform in Europe. See this post for more on his presentation.

Finally an interesting quote, very much in rhythm with the drum I am bashing:

 ”Mobile users are ready and willing to engage with their favourite brands on mobile devices.”

– Matt Millar, Director of Mobile and Devices EMEA at Adobe