Why the cellphone industry should fear Apple
Hint: The answer has nothing to do with music.
In 1993, Apple introduced the Newton, a groundbreaking “personal digital assistant” (PDA). The product was too big to fit in a pocket and expensive for what it could do. Apple allowed it to live for about 5 years, introducing a number of new models and enhancements, and fixing some of the most significant problems with the product before finally killing it off in 1998. The Newton is a classic case of a product before it’s time. It wouldn’t be long before technology advances would enable a Newton-like device to be small, powerful, and affordable. In fact, Palm Computing introduced the PalmPilot in 1996 and this product would successfully establish the PDA market.
I never owned a Newton, but I had friends that did and swore by them. The Newton earned the same kind of undying loyalty as other Apple products, mainly because it was an insanely great product. It simply arrived before either the technology or the market were ready for it.
Samsung and Nokia are two great companies that have prospered in the years since the Newton faded away. Both are market leaders in the cellphone industry and both make great products. I’ve owned both Nokia and Samsung phones and have been very pleased with them. Each has introduced innovations to the market that have moved the cellphone industry forward.
And both now find themselves in Apple’s sights.
Apple’s iPhone is most often compared to modern music phones. However, the real opportunity for the market (and the real threat to Samsung, Nokia and others) is in making mobile devices do so much more than just make phone calls and play songs. Building all kinds of products into the mobile device that you always have with you and mobilizing every service and process are areas of huge growth potential. However, these opportunities are constrained by the challenges of providing an intuitive and usable interface on a small device.
Well guess what, that’s the challenge Apple ably solved a decade ago with the Newton interface, but the cellphone industry has chosen to ignore the lessons Apple provided as they’ve moved towards this common future.
I recently stumbled across (thanks MobilityBeat) an article by Sean Luke, a computer science professor at George Mason University and a long-time Newton hobbyist. Sean compared the Newton to the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, especially from a developer’s perspective. Here are some of Sean’s observations (I recommend reading the whole article to get the complete context including the things for which Sean praises Nokia):
- “Technologically speaking, the N800 is a dramatic advance over the Newton.”
- “Newton apps know where all of their documents are on the machine, and can sort them all, perform sophisticated searches on them, file them, move them from card to card to internal store, bundle them up and beam them to other Newtons, etc. It’s all highly consistent and elegant. … The N800 uses a file system similar to a PC. This makes for a surprisingly worse user experience…”
- “On the Newton, you write directly in text fields and entry areas. … On the N800, you click on a text field and up pops the keyboard or HWR entry window. You enter your text letter by letter, and close the text entry mechanism. Over and over again. …”
- “The Newton can print and fax and applications can easily do it because they rendered text the same way to the printer/fax as they did to the screen. The N800, to my knowledge, can do neither, and I don’t expect it to any time soon…”
- “The Newton has fantastic battery life and the N800’s is only okay. Specifically: 30 hours on a Newton (and several weeks in standby) vs 6 hrs and a several days standby on the N800.”
- “The N800’s “Hildon” UI… tries to copy much of the look and feel of Windows 95, including IMHO its worst features. Nokia then took this toolkit and tweaked it to look if not feel a little better, but couldn’t escape their cell phone roots: the modified version they created is very, very modal…. only one application may appear at a time; applications take up the entire screen; and applications interact with one another rather less than in the Newton.”
- “On the Newton you can have multiple applications displayed at one time. Typically one application is in the background taking up the whole screen … and other applications, or subwindows of the main application, may float freely on the screen…. This allows for drag-and-drop or via-event application interaction which largely doesn’t exist on the N800. On the N800 all dialogs and notification windows are fixed in location and no additional windows are permitted. You just have one application take over or another…”
- “The Newton is rock-solid stable. The N800 is not. In the course of using the machine I’ve had status bar icons disappear, Opera crash once or twice, menus refuse to go away without me choosing something, and the machine suddenly disavow all knowledge of its SD card. But the worst by far is the email program, which crashes as a matter of course. It’s like crashzilla. The Newton crashes so little that I had forgotten what crashes looked like on a PDA.”
- “The Icon Bar on the Newton is for whatever apps you find useful to place there. Just drag them from the Newton’s equivalent of the File Manager. But on the N800, there are three big, overly-spaced icons which cannot be replaced; and only the third one, which pops up a menu, allows part of that menu to be changed.”
- “Longhand is slow, and so the Newton UI designers spent a great deal of time making a large number of powerful widgets shared by all applications. … The N800 uses very few pop-ups or other time-saving widgets. For example, to add a field to a contact, I must first click on a weird “>>” button and choose “Edit… “. Then I must click on “Add field”, choose a field, and press “OK”, then “OK” again. All told six button taps and two dialog boxes when I could have done this with a single pop-up menu. I am afraid to say it, but the N800 has a great many frustrating dialog box mazes like this one.”
- “Nokia seems to have a triangle fetish. … Icons which perform different functions should look nothing like one another. Yet we have at least five different major functions, all being represented with the same basic shape. … Icons which perform the same basic function should look largely identical. But even the two menu-scrolling triangles have different aspect ratios! The triangles which pop up various objects are all different looking. And to make matters worse, there are other strange triangular icons which also pop up menus…”
- ” The N800 has various dialogs and notification boxes. For absolutely no good reason, none of them can be moved.”
Considering that the next big opportunity is to drive mobility into the products, services, and processes that everyday people use every day in their jobs and their lives, on which company would you place your bet for making mobility really work in the marketplace?
Similarly, I recently ran across an article on CNET comparing the Samsung Q1 UMPC to the Newton. This piece was much more light-hearted (and lightweight) than Dr. Luke’s analysis, but still declared the Newton as the knock-out winner in a head-to-head brawl with the Q1.
Bottom line, Apple knows a thing or two about mobile interface design and even with an ancient product has shamed two of the industry’s leaders. If you believe that usability is a key to industry growth (and I do), then Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, et al had better be hard at work on dramatically improving what they plan to introduce to compete with Apple’s iPhone.