Christian Lindholm is Managing Partner and Director at convergence design agency Fjord and a long-time developer of mobile products.
Three years since the launch of the iPhone, the iPhone is the de-facto smartphone. The only option for other handset makers now is to stop copying the form factor of the iPhone and differentiate themselves in other ways.
The first iPhone was maybe not a great phone, particularly feature-wise, but it has been universally acknowledged as a huge step forward in phone design. It became dominant. As with any case of a dominant design, other phones rush in to imitate.
Since its launch, we have seen a number of mobile devices trying to imitate the look and feel of the iPhone.
Early designs patently did not succeed in this, and it took a long time before a phone was released that could feasibly beat the iPhone at its own game. No phone came close to providing an adequate substitute experience.
These 'iPhone killer' devices have gotten progressively better, though, and now, at Mobile World Congress 2010 (this week in Barcelona), we are beginning to see a new class of device that can, more or less, match the iPhone for functionality. The Samsung Wave is one example of this.
The Wave presents a realistic challenge to the iPhone -- it has the same form factor as the iPhone, and even features an iPhone style 'app store' for downloading games, mapping, eBooks, and lifestyle applications. It has an iPhone-like hardware set too -- a 1GHz processor, a 3.3 inch touchscreen, an anti-smudge screen.
It is too early to say how much impact the Windows Phone 7 Series will have on the market. The videos produced by Microsoft were thin, hardware unavailable to test, and details sketchy. We have an inkling that it will be a fun, locked down, iPhone-like phone with a gorgeous OS, but that's about it.
Nevertheless, we are now seeing devices that are able to pose a realistic challenge to the iPhone. Devices such as the Samsung Wave and the Windows Phone 7 Series will, to an observer not caught up in the Apple hype, present a reasonable substitute to the Apple devices.
The iPhone has not yet reached a level of emotional attachment where it will be bought even when reasonable substitutes exist. Some people will think, what the hell, I just want a phone, and this offers roughly the same experience.
The real turning point however, will be when developers stop trying to copy the iPhone's design, and accept that they can create something unique and cool outside the iPhone's form factor.
Increasingly, manufacturers are doing just that, and we are seeing the first wave of these kind of devices at Mobile World Congress 2010. We are seeing three different segments develop in the market around features, cost, and size.
Nokia, for instance, has created the N900. The N900 is a bit like a micro-tablet. Through differentiating the size of the device, Nokia has created something that neither looks nor feels like the iPhone.
Sony has released the XPeria X10 and the XPeria X10 Mini Pro. The pro version has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard -- and stuff like Timescape for aggregating all of your content in one place. All of these features seem to fall outside what Apple can or will be willing to do with the product. This can only be a good thing.
Similarly, we may see a class of innovation on features, on simplicity, on energy efficiency, or on robustness. In any case, the genie is out the bottle.
In 1997, the dominant phone in town was the Nokia 6110. Manufacturers found the only way to beat it was to create phones with different form factors, costs, and feature bases. From that, we saw innovation and segmentation in three key areas -- features, cost, and size. We may just be in for a new wave of innovation.
Christian Lindholm is Managing Partner and Director at Fjord, a convergence design agency. In his previous role as Vice President of Global Mobile Products for Yahoo, he was responsible for the global creation of the company’s various mobile products. Before joining Yahoo, he spent 10 years with Nokia in various roles in the areas of user interface, product creation and venturing. During that time, he invented the Nokia Navi-key user interface, fathered the Series 60 user interface and created Nokia Lifeblog – a multimedia diary. He’s based in London.