Larry coined it -- "iPhone Envy". It's the feelings Windows Mobile and Blackberry (the people responsible for those brands) have in regard to the innovative iPhone Experience.
All smartfone brands are converging on The iPhone Experience, which I keep saying in Tufte's way, is devoid of administrative debris. That's a pretty high hurdle, as we shall come to find out, for the sucky interface designers at the leading software and hardware companies who are trapped in the legacy features of their past products and in the soggy, undemanding design cultures of their corporations.
HTC Touch (a lame device Sprint is marketing ... lame because it runs Windows-sucky-Mobile) is one of the mee-too iPhones.
Blackberry's Bold is RIM's defensive attempt to keep Crackberry addicts in the glass house from migrating to Apple's opium den next door. I mean, an iPhone with less screen and full of text keys is simply a Blackberry with iPhone characteristics (I'm thinking of the Chinese bureaucrats who said, in effect, 'we seek a centralized system with capitalist characteristics' -- or some hilariously fudged nonsequitur like that).
Now Microsoft, according to its usual lame PR playbook, is trying to rally its mobile partners with a pep talk designed & timed to usurp at least some mojo from Apple's 3G iPhone marketing ramp.
Conclusions. I have none yet. Unfortunately for the truly innovative, customers are pretty dumb and after a while tend to be unaware of the real original. Look at how many Original Ray's Pizza venues there are in New York City. You can tell the real original: it doesn't say "original".
Apple's iPhone -- the Original iPhone!
Is there any more proof than that provided by this current Pied-Piper scenario that money -- especially in committees -- makes you stupid? Why has Andy Lees not evidently read the Cluetrain?
The most annoying device I own is an almost but not quite iPod from Samsung (I got it because it was cheap and plays oggs.) Copying Apple and not getting it quite right is hard on the users.
Why not make a phone that's good at being its own design, not bad at being Apple? Some people like clicky buttons.
Posted by: Don Marti | June 26, 2008 at 12:54 PM