Why iPhone is 5 years ahead

In the launch-day report on BBC WORLD, the reporter David Willis explained the benefits of the iPhone on the general market, like this:

…some believe it will revolutionize the mobile phone industry – as rivals seek to match the iPhone, feature for feature.

Clearly, Willis has gotten the gist of it - the way iPhone is revolutionary is that as other try to emulate it – the world of mobile phones will be a better one.

It’s not about features

However, it’s not that the competitors will need to copy the iPhone “feature for feature”. My old Windows Mobile 5-driven HTC can do way more than the iPhone, as can my LG Prada.

The Prada, too, sports a great design and a full blown touch screen. All of which are features. What the other phones need to emulate, however – is the experience!

Sure, I can get to my email on the Prada, but it isn’t easy, nor is it fun. Yes, I have a WiFi connection on my HTC, but I feel like I should get a nobel prize for getting through the hellish hoops, which I have to jump through to get it connected… I can, in theory, listen to music on the Prada – but it’s a very confusing experience indeed.

What Apple has done with the iPhone, is make the phone experience fun. I’ve had a lot of phones through the years, and none of them have been any fun.

Waiting for the competition

So, when Steve Jobs say the iPhone is five years ahead of the pack – why is he right?

Well, the iPhone experience has been three years in development. That’s three years with some of the best engineers and UI designers working from a clean slate, on making the best user experience, ever.

One can only assume that the competition, some of which (Nokia and Windows Mobile, I’m looking at you) are quite stuck in their ways already, and turning the ship around may take even longer than the fresh canvas of Apple.

We’ve seen some emulations of the iPhone experience already. Most notably, perhaps, is Opera Mini 4 Beta, who has adapted a similar way of browsing the web as the iPhone Safari browser (And even poking some fun at the iPhone in a Mac vs. PC spoof…)

But even though the Opera Mini is a step in the right direction (and the only one at that for us poor Europeans), it is still not the solution to the problem. As the Opera-browser is a separate Java-application on the phone, it is also a completely separate experience. There is no uniform, good experience in any other phone on the market – and once the other mobile phone makers start to get the emulation of that right, thats when the true revolution will be in effect.