my name is mwd

Hap, who’s over visiting from Seattle this week, let me play with his iPhone today. I’m pretty impressed. The user interface is just leaps and bounds ahead of what’s out there in either the mobile phone, PDA, or mp3 player market today, at least compared to what I’ve played with of late. Really, it is quite amazing. It’s very intuitive to use, with the possible exception of the on screen keyboard, which I think might take a little bit of getting used to. But it’s very, very neat. The device is also much slimmer than I’d imagined. It’s a very nice bit of kit all round.

Thankfully for my bank balance you can’t get an iPhone here in the UK yet.

The most important thing I think the iPhone will do is force other vendors to up their game. Most mobile phone user interfaces to date have been quite poor, almost awful if you count things like the Motorola V3 I had. The V3 had software bugs that showed a total absence of any quality control or thought in terms of user experience – a big company like Motorola, which makes nice hardware, shouldn’t be screwing up that much. But even my current phone (a Sony Ericsson K800i), which is much better, has a fairly basic, and at times most annoying, user interface. Hopefully the iPhone will force other phone companies to think about the user experience now in order to compete. That I believe will be the most important legacy of the iPhone.