The iPhone juggernaut just keeps rolling. The phone will soon be available from Orange and Vodafone in the UK — good news for those networks which have no doubt had to deal with lots of people (me included) leaving not because the service was bad, but simply because whatever they could offer, it wasn’t an iPhone. And I definitely needed an iPhone. Not because it was cool (although that helps) or because in my professional life I have used Macs for 20 years, but mostly because it suits my simple mind.
Meanwhile as its monopoly on the iPhone is being broken, O2 is preparing to launch another O2- exclusive phone — the Palm Pre.
Palm, which was at the vanguard of personal digital assistants (PDAs) in the 90s with the Palm Pilot, saw the market for its devices shift as phones became more and more sophisticated. Palm then entered the phone market with the Treo, which looked much more like a BlackBerry than an iPhone. But is their first touchscreen phone, as the phrase goes, an iPhone killer? I’ve lost count of the number of machines that have come and gone claiming to be iPod killers (do you ever see anyone on the train listening to a Zune?).
So how has Apple done it? 'Well, the competition keep referring to their products' greater power, better cameras (everything has a better camera than an iPhone) and ever more advanced technology. Mostly, however, it’s about making technology simple enough for human beings (me, at any rate) to use. The Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker once described Apple products, in a piece titled ‘I hate Macs’ as "glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults". But that’s just the point of Apple; their products are designed to be so simple a child could use them — and anyone wanting to take Apple on has to think user-friendly first, technology second.
The old Palm Pilot worked because it was easy to use and easy to understand. Whether their new touchscreen phone will be an iPhone killer in the mass market will not depend on its processing power, the megapixels of its camera or the bells and whistles it comes with. It will simply come down to whether it, like so many of the great inventions of human history, is, like the iPhone, moron-proof.
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