TIME’s Invention Of the Year: The iPhone

TIME declares the iPhone to be the “Invention of the Year”. Yep, I know, so what else is new? And, as the article is quick to point out, lots of people are now “sick of hearing about it!” But some of the reasons they chose the device are actually quite insightful…

Here are the five reasons:

1. The iPhone is pretty
2. It’s touchy-feely
3. It will make other phones better
4. It’s not a phone, it’s a platform
5. It is but the ghost of iPhones yet to come

Ok, so reasons 1 and 2 are stating the obvious - and to be fair, these are the two things that Apple absolutely excels at. If anyone was going to set a new standard in cellphone design and usability, it had to be Apple. Nevertheless, we have now come to expect no less of Mr. Jobs and his consumer design gurus - most notably of course, Jonathan Ive (Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple), who is internationally renowned as the principal designer of the iMac, iPod and the iPhone.

The other 3 reasons are a lot more important in my mind, especially when viewed in the light of the first two:

Reason 3 - It will make other phones better

I imagine that when they first saw Apple’s iPhone Product announcement, every other cellphone vendor must have literally gulped in their design rooms and declared “This changes everything”. And it did - we are already starting to see this: Nearly every major vendor has since announced or released some sort of touch-screen iPhone competitor.

With the iPhone, Apple threw down a gauntlet - both in terms of design and the resulting power it could weld over the Network Providers - that has fundamentally changed the industry. And while they certainly haven’t perfected either yet, the ground-braking changes they introduced are definitely laudable.

Reason 4 - It’s not a phone, it’s a platform

This has been my assertion from the start - and remarkably, apparently unintentional on Apple’s part. Apple (or Steve Jobs at least) initially appeared to want to treat the iPhone just like any other iPod: a closed and completely locked-down device. But after much outcry from the ‘faithful’, they have finally begun to show signs of capitulating.

The iPhone is built on a cut-down version of OSX - immediately making the device an extremely powerful and mature platform that is almost as potentially functional as any Mac computer. And all this comes in a elegantly small package that you carry in your hand. Perhaps for the first time, we now have a truly mobile device with a useable ‘touch’ interface that can easily be grasped in the “real world” by everyday users. As Grossman point out “The iPhone gets applications like Google Maps out onto the street, where we really need them.” This is truly unique.

Reason 5 - It is but the ghost of iPhones yet to come

Lastly, and possibly most importantly, what we now have is version 1 of the iPhone. Apple is notorious for cannibalising its own products with a better version of the same thing, before its competitors can. And given how many faults we have managed to find in terms of things that are missing or could be done better, I imagine version 2 or 3 will be significant improvements again.

Apple has not only changed the game for the cellphone industry, it has also changed what users expect to see in the ‘next version’. Just look at what Apple has done with each generation of iPods - no longer will cosmetic additions be enough in a new cellphone model. I expect to see industry impact or at least adaption as a result.

So, TIME nominated the iPhone ‘Invention of the Year’, and rightly so in my opinion. It’s also a candidate for Gadget of the Year. When we look back on 2007, its going to be pretty interesting to see just how much of an influence this radical little product will have had - both on the Cellphone Industry, and high-end Consumer Technology in general.

See quoted article by Lev Grossman - Invention Of the Year: The iPhone - TIME

Originally from TechGripe! by Brett Ryland (4 November 2007).