Interesting things being announced at Mobile World Congress in
Barcelona. Lots of new touch-screen phones, all chasing the iPhone.
Fancy that.
From this "Bond-style wristwatch phone joins gizmo assault on Apple"
at http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/17/smartphones-mobile-
world-congress-barcelona. "assault on Apple", "hope will give them a
much-needed edge over Apple's iPhone", "sparked by the launch of
Apple's iPhone in summer 2007", "hopes to gain the upper hand against
Apple", "particularly desperate to hit back at Apple". Get the picture?
New devices from Samsung, Sony Ericsson, HTC, LG, etc. And Nokia
announced a new apps store. The point is made that "the iPhone showed
that the combination of cutting edge technology and ease of use could
create a real buzz" (Richard Wray).
Apple did what they did with iPod - and through their real user-
centric approach, made a product design work brilliantly. The rest
now copy madly, as fast as they can.
I'd love to know how genuinely user-centric the other manufacturers
are with their product design and development processes, compared
with Apple. Are they (I speculate wildly) purely imitating product
functionality and features and adding wizzy-ness, just to add to the
product feature specs? Or are they actually considering usability and
what users would find properly useful and usable?
On the back page of the main section, O2/Apple had a full page ad
saying that there are over 15,000 apps on App Store, covering
anything you'd ever want to do.
