Missing the iPhone’s point

Every week, it seems, some device maker or cellular carrier is announcing its iPhone killer. The latest is the HTC Touch, whose main claim to fame is that it has beat Apple’s iPhone to the 3G market (3G being the set of faster cellular networks than what the current iPhone uses). Never mind that the HTC Touch won’t ship until June — around the time that the new 3G iPhone is rumored to launch — so any claims of being first are premature.

But who cares if the HTC Touch is first to run on 3G networks? Apple has proven that being first is not critical to success. The iPod came years after other MP3 players. The iPhone came years after other so-called smartphones.

Now, I haven’t used an HTC Touch, so it could be a worthwhile iPhone competitor. In our last smartphone comparison, InfoWorld chief technologist Tom Yager had good things to say about several predecessor HTC devices.

I have played with another iPhone competitor, Verizon Wireless’s XV6800, which is a remarkably bad device. It is this ilk that best demonstrates how competitors to Apple routinely miss the point.

What Apple does well — most of the time — is create a compelling user experience that delights customers. The iPod did that for MP3 players and the iPhone has done that for mobile Internet devices. (The AppleTV did not.) So much so that people pay more for these devices than for competitors — so many people in fact that Apple all but owns the MP3 player market and is coming on very strong very fast in the smartphone market.

Then look most of the iPhone competitors. Grafting a touchscreen to a unusable UI doesn’t make a device an iPhone killer. People don’t buy iPhones because they have touchscreens; they buy iPhones because they are useful, cool devices. The touchscreen is just part of what makes the iPhone cool and useful.

That Verizon travesty is a great example of such Frankenthinking. The touchscreen works on the outside (though the GUI is unusably bad), but when you open it up to expose the physical keyboard, the inside screen — the one you would use with the keyboard — isn’t a touchscreen as you would expect. So, you can touch but not type, or type but not touch.

And did I mention the GUI is so bad that any other features that might be on the phone don’t matter — it’s too painful to try to find them, much less use them. Who could possibly have thought this product should have been put on the market?

When competitors gets the real point that Apple has repeatedly made — people prefer stuff that works well and delights them — and start designing and engineering accordingly, the iPhone will stop being the archteype of the smartphone done right and instead become just another smartphone.

HTC and Nokia seem to have the best shot of getting this point. We’ll see when the HTC Touch is actually available and what Nokia does in its forthcoming N96. History tells me they might come close, but that Apple will change the rules again and restart the competition at a new level. We’ll see.