One Shot Design :: 2008 :: March

The shape of smartphones to come

With the release of the iPhone, all the mobile phone makers received a huge slap in the face as far as UI design was concerned. Most of them designed their interfaces to transpose the desktop user experience to a wearable device, which is conceptually a big mistake. Who wants to be editing a spreadsheet on a 2.5 inch screen?

Since Apple has shown the way, Microsoft has decided to improve version 7 of Windows Mobile, or in other words: make it look more like the iPhone. Actually before the iPhone was released, Neonode had done some remarkable work on the interface. LG collaborated with Prada to produce a phone which was unveiled a couple of days before the iPhone. HTC also does some very good interface tweaking on top of Windows Mobile.

Depite being stylish, the iPhone comes with a lot of strings attached. It is tied to a single carrier and the Apple license is extremely restrictive. There are several projects to of open-source phones aiming at fostering the development of third-party application: Motorolla already has marketed a Linux phone, Qtopia has a working operating syste, Palm is working on a new OS based on Linux and OpenMoko is still in beta version. These are all different flavors of Linux that will definitely not be compatible.

This February, several manufacturers brought their prototypes running Google Android to the Barcelona fair. Google Inc. is putting their money where their mouth is, literally. I mean, they are forking out US$ 10,000,000.00 to attract potential third-party developers. Google already did a lot of work on its mail, calendar and map services, and these will likely be well integrated with the Android mobile phone platform. Rather than trying to imitate the iPhone, they will most certainly have a winner if the software allows good interaction with MS Windows, Apple OS X, GNU/Linux, PDA’s and mobile phones.