At the rate Apple’s Vice President of Design keeps winning awards for the iPhone, he’s going to need a bigger mantle! Last time it was the unprecedented (and continued!) domination of the uber-elite Black Pencil, now it’s the Mobile Data Association 2008 MDA Personal Achievement Award.
Said the judges of Ive’s iPhone design:
“It sets the bar very high for all present and future competitors and as such, is shaking the mobile phone industry. We look forward to seeing Ive’s design innovation continuing to challenge the mobile world.”
They’re right. For the last long while, when it comes to consumer electronic design, there’s been Apple’s Ive and pretty much nobody else.
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Pop quiz, hotshot: You’re the acclaimed director of Finding Nemo and a Bug’s Life. Your latest project, Wall-E, requires a state-of-the-art-of-design robot straight from the 26th century. What do you do?
If you answered, call your boss Steven P. Jobs, who also happens to run a little, perennially design-award winning, consumer electronics company called Apple, and see if he can hook you up with uber-designer Jonathan Ive, than you, like Andrew Stanton, are correct.
Ive, the genius behind Apple’s industrial design team, oft-(poorly)-imitated industry trend-setter, and innovator of the twin-injection plastics technology seen in the iPod and the aluminum and glass innovations in the iMac and iPhone, was uniquely positioned to glance just that far into the future, whether or not he could declassify said glance:
Stanton said that it was a “lovefest” with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. “Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,” says Stanton. “The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.” (Through a spokesman, Ive declined to comment.)
Is Eve just a cute CG character for this summer’s Pixar blockbuster, or a glimmer of iPhone (iDroid?) designs to come? Only Ive knows for sure, and he ain’t sharing.
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Sramana Mitra has an interesting post up comparing Apple to Palm. Actually, she’s been on a tear lately when it comes to Palm and how they’ve dropped the corporate management ball. She scored a comprehensive interview with former Palm Executive Eric Benhamou, which reads very nicely but is also a clear example of how the problems Palm has now are the direct result of their earlier problems. Basically they followed the exact opposite trajectory that Apple did in nearly the same time period (basically).
Anyway, back to the intersection of the two companies. Mitra writes:
Rubinstein and Jobs could not agree on the iPhone’s strategy wrt the Keyboard. This tells me that Rubinstein has a separate but perhaps also compelling vision on how the keyboard needs to be incorporated into smartphones. I can’t wait to see what that vision entails!
John Rubinstein (Palm) vs. Steve Jobs (iPhone) - Sramana Mitra on Strategy
It’s surely not the case (one assumes) that Rubenstein left Apple over the keyboard issue (though that would be hilarious); but it is interesting that the guy who ran the iPod division, the podfather himself, was pro-physical-keyboard for the iPhone. Now, of course, he’s hard at work over at Palm, they who basically specialize in keyboard + touchscreen smartphones.
One wonders what other ideas Rubenstein had that didn’t make the cut on the iPhone. If “Podfather” Rubenstein’s input was 86′d on the iPhone, then one assumes that it was all Ive and Jobs, just like everybody’s always said.
There’s a big article in the New York Times that includes an interview with Steve Jobs about the excellent shape that Apple’s in nowadays. Apple is 3rd in computer shipments overall. They might slip to 4th when Acer buys Gateway after Gateway buys Packard Bell, but Apple will still have more growth than the resulting top three. The Times did an interview with Jobs, and he of course has some choice things to say about everything — Leopard vs. Vista, Ultimate Editions, the iPhone’s multitouch interface, the delays of Leopard, and the Newton.
‘Mr. Jobs said that multitouch drastically simplified the process of controlling a computer.
There are no “verbs” in the iPhone interface, he said, alluding to the way a standard mouse or stylus system works. In those systems, users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or “verb,” to do something to it.’
I’ve written about what Ars Technica called the ‘New Frontier’ of the SDK, and I agreed with Ars that it was coming. Anyone that gripes about the availability of the development kit for making apps on the iPhone doesn’t give enough credit for what Apple has created with multitouch.
figure 1: John Gruber
John Gruber of Daring Fireball has posted an excellent discussion on the various subtleties of the language used in Steve Jobs’ iPhone SDK letter. He talks of HTML widgets vs. the stripped-down Cocoa API, the security of the current iPhone, the hidden compliment-slash-dig on Nokia and their recent “open to anything” marketing slogan, signed apps, the iTunes App store, and with his usual attention to detail and insight. Well worth the read there, like any long Gruber post.
Gruber also points to a blog post for OSX developers that intend to write applications for the iPhone, which led to a comment-discussion by several mac developers, and where they intend to aim their development efforts — both in functionality of their applications, and price thereof. It looks like there’s plenty of hope for the $5 app, if they can be guaranteed to be paid. There’s still the lingering question of how available the SDK will be — and that’s excellently addressed by Frasier Spiers on a blog post at his site.
figure 1: iPhone vs. HTC Touch vs. Nokia N95
According to an article in ComputerWorld, the iPhone handily beat other smartphones (printable version) in almost all of the usability categories. The iphone competed against the HTC Touch (Windows Mobile) and the Nokia N95 (S60 Symbian) in usability tests performed by Texas-based Perceptive Sciences. Their test group was with ten people that had never used any of the three phones, so it’s unfortunately a fairly small sample size. The article title gives the net result away, but read on for the highlights from their test.
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figure 1: on left, iPhone from yesterday’s keynote. Note the orange. On right, my iPhone.
I’m almost I’m embarrassed to report it, but I noticed that Calculator is getting a new icon. I think it’s safe to say that it will arrive with the new update. In other news, I looked through the localizable.strings file for the new iTunes, and found no new strings of note pertaining to the iPhone.
There’s an insightful post over at 37signals that talks about the handoff of design cues that iterate from product to product from Apple. He adroitly notes the design similarities between the iPhone and the new iMac; he similarly notes the connections between the iPod and the old iMac. It goes without saying that a company that was in such a hurry to drop keyboards for their iPhones sure makes some nice keys for the computers that still need them. [Daring Fireball Filter]
Posted on Monday, Jul 2, 2007 by Mike Overbo
Tags: activation, Apple, AT&T, battery, design, Editorial, hype, iPhone, keyboard, News, omgnoappz, plan
File Under:Bluetooth, Featured, Reviews
So, after twelve hours of waiting in line, it didn’t take me long to take the iPhone out and start playing around with it. I didn’t get the zip and seal treatment that some folks got at AT&T stores, but then again, the MOA was trying to zip people through as efficiently as possible. Here are my impressions, there will be a full review later with video and pictures.
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It fascinates me that Apple’s marketing and commercial videos for the iPhone so far has also been all training. They show the iPhone being used for the main tasks that people will use, and that’s it. The interface is good enough that it sells itself and doubles as a training video, which is brilliant.
They really want you to be able to use the device without you ever getting the Glazed Eye or the Thousand Yard Stare.
