[jrockway]

Not sure I agree. The iPhone has great visual effects, but the Android phones I've played with seem a lot more usable. Google services integrate wonderfully, and the third-party apps tend to do cooler things. (Hello tethering, location awareness, etc.)

[zimbabwe]

If you treat your phone like a feature list then the iPhone has competition. Its best apps are vastly cooler than anything else on a mobile platform, but the iPhone itself is simply a very good phone feature-wise, nothing incredibly standout.

If any part of you cares about usability, or about gorgeous interfaces, or about incredible design, then you can't go with any phone other than the iPhone. There's no competition. The Pre is the closest thing there is, but even it's not at all close.

Apple as a company has thoroughly nitpicked its designs. Some people don't notice - you seem like you're the type not to be anal about design. For the people that live for design, the iPhone is something of a miracle. I can't think of many things that are as beautiful as the iPhone.

Most people are somewhere between me and you. Some people don't want many features, but they want the things they've got to be gorgeous; other people don't notice the little blips in design and stick to phones that are better at other things.

The iPhone and Android aren't competing with one another. They're mobile OSes that focus on doing very different things, aimed at different markets. Google gets that. I don't know if the phone manufacturers licensing Android get it, because they keep trying to compare themselves to the iPhone. They shouldn't; they have a solid product that happens to target a different market. So what's neat is that you can get the phone you want and I can get the phone I want, and we can both go away thinking we've got the better phone, and both of us are right.

[jmonegro]

Concerning design, you have got to see the HTC Hero Android phone with HTC's new "Sense" android UI design. It's beautiful. More than the iPhone (although that might be because I've grown a bored of the iPhone UI)

http://gizmodo.com/5301948/htc-debuts-hero-with-fresh-face-f...

http://gizmodo.com/5302637/htc-heros-teflon-coating-makes-th...

http://gizmodo.com/5302323/htc-ceo-says-the-sexy-sense-andro...

http://gizmodo.com/5301955/htc-hero-android-phone-hands+on-w...

So yeah, Apple better watch out design-wise, and allow official downloadable themes for the iPhone via AppStore.

[zimbabwe]

This is where the disagreement comes in. (Keep in mind that this is one person's view and I'm upfront about this being a personal set of opinions.) The Hero looks very nice, but it suffers from having a lot of unnecessary junk. It's shaped oddly. Its buttons look very cheap. That back looks like something out of the 80s. I don't like the plastic iPhone back, but the Hero's is worse.

The UI looks very chaotic (except for the web browser, which looked terrific). That home page with the two clocks and the smaller icons below it? Horrible. I also don't like the three-button curve that appears on the bottom, and how I can't tell from looking what the two buttons on either side will do, because they lack context within whatever application that is.

Graphically, there's a lot of random crap that doesn't seem to have a reason for existing. A ton of gradients, a ton of stylistic decisions I dislike. For instance: putting the letters on the numeric buttons for the phone dialer. Those letters will never be used on the Hero, because there's a better solution (display a separate keyboard). They're there just to emulate older, poorer phones, and they add clutter where clutter's not needed. (I could be very anal and say that I dislike the slight space between the various numbers, because when you're dealing with a nonphysical interface there's no need for space between buttons, and there's no aesthetic advantage for it, and it adds visual complexity.)

Compare that to the iPhone. There are absolutely no unnecessary parts to any of it. The only custom image you get appears when you have to unlock the phone, and it only appears there so that there's no blank space on the unlocking screen. The main phone OS has a black background. The only added elements are the icons, which serve as instant distinction between functions. The OS's options appear only as an icon (similarly to how System Preferences on the Mac runs as an application instead of a special function). You get a simple grid of every single function on your phone, bar none, and the way you customize how it looks is by moving applications around. The only stylistic choice in that layout is the rounded curves of the buttons, but there's even a logic behind that: by trimming the buttons down, Apple reduces the clutter that would otherwise appear in a screen that's a single grid, and the rounded corners add a physical limitation to the graphic's design. If they'd stuck to boxes, then you'd get a lot of ugly icons like I see in the Hero, a lot of attempted complexity. By rounding the corners Apple added a slight style that compels designers to adapt to that shape, and adaptation to that shape usually means making something simple and user-friendly.

Look at the globe icon on Hero's Bookmarks pane. Or the seemingly meaningless simplicity of the home page shown in Image 8 of that last post. Or in Image 5, how the selector bubble on the bottom would overlap the selector bubbles of the unselected icons. Image 17 shows it most clearly: Look at the iPhone next to the Hero. From the iPhone's screen I can make out twelve separate actions from the image alone, barring the knowledge I have of the other apps (that twelve discounts the Twitter and Facebook apps, as well as Safari). I can tell that there are four pages of applications and that there are six new Mail messages. Even the top bar is simplified: I can make out the reception and the battery life, and see that the time is 6:56 PM, because the design is so high-contrast. On Hero, I can barely make out what the clock says, I can't read the top bar at all because it's multicolored and so doesn't translate with the poor camera quality, I can't read any of the icons except for the Browser (whose icon is incredibly vague), the only other application I can read is that of the Phone, and at most I can make out six buttons, two of which are very vague. It's all on a low-contrast background, to make things worse. The iPhone has the single button visible, and the purpose of it is incredibly simple: it quits applications. With the Hero, I can only guess at the two - Search and Back - and those two make the entire phone look lopsided.

I'll also point out that there is an HTC logo on the Hero and no logo whatsoever on the iPhone. In fact, the only visual mark on the iPhone at all is the square on the button that is shaped like an application button.

This is the distinction in design that I mentioned to jrockway. When I, and others like me (many of whom are iPhone developers), look at things, this is what we see, and we see it instantly. Where other people might get a vague feeling of something not being right, we break designs down almost reflexively. When I use an OS, the very first thing I notice is how the OS handles my clicking the desktop and starting a selection box, and the second thing I notice is the design of application windows; I'll reject a lot of applications and web sites and so on within seconds of seeing them because something doesn't look or feel right. Sometimes I rationalize that by saying I don't want to use a product that wasn't made by somebody with the same insane passion for detail that I've got; other times I think it's one of those small irrationalities that help us all filter the world. In any event, when talking design I don't mean whether or not something looks pretty, because pretty can be deceiving (and Apple's been guilty of this too: see brushed metal and reflective surfaces). I refer more to the logic of a design: Why was each individual design choice made, and how does it add up to the integrity of the overall design?

That's not how everybody ought to judge things. It's just as arbitrary as judging things by how much they let you tinker around with them, or how open their software is. Some people will never care about it, just as I rarely care about open source work. But what I've come to understand is that for each of us individually, this various arbitration isn't just a way of being contrary, it's how we look at the world around us, and dismissing that to parade a bunch of points is ignorant and contemptful. If I were going around mocking the FSF and its fans, I'd be just as much an asshole as the people who insult Apple fans for spending excessive amounts of money on things that don't offer a lot of functionality. You might like the idea of downloadable themes: To me, theming is a terrible abomination. It speaks of cowardice and a lack of design integrity. You probably think that's absolutely ridiculous, but try to understand that I see theming in a similarly ridiculous light and you'll start to get what I mean when I made that point about different markets and different people. It's okay that we all look for different things, so long as we respect those various opinions and don't look down at them for being nonsense.

I'm not just writing this to you, jmonegro. I'm writing it to a lot of the people in this thread and others, who keep clashing by arguing a viewpoint like it's the definitive Truth. A lot of time is wasted bickering because a lot of us here don't like admitting that two perfectly logical people can still disagree on things, and especially where things like Apple products are concerned people occasionally get very vicious. (Not on this particular thread, thankfully.) I'd like it if some of you reading this could take the time and consider the dissenting side's points of view; sometimes, it's okay that people disagree and it doesn't have to lead to the beating of a dead debate horse.

(Thanks a lot for posting those links: I'd never seen the Hero before and I likely wouldn't have if you hadn't made finding information so convenient.)

[jmonegro]

You do make a strong point, though as I see it, you take an usability point of view rather than a pure eye-candy one.

I have to admit I have not looked at the usability of Sense UI for the Hero with such scrunity, and I also have to admit you make some very good points. It is true that the iPhone's UI is simple, streamlined, consistent, and stays out of your way (most of the time) while managing to be nice on the eyes. It's a great feat by the designers at apple, and it's one of the reasons why the iPhone is one of the most advanced phones on the market, yet it is still accessible by pretty much any demographic without disorienting them.

But, let's look at it this way. The iPhone was released roughly two years ago (I did some research, and, what do you know, it was released exactly two years ago, June 29th, 2007), and they interface hasn't changed at all. This doesn't bother me much, but the UI has stayed the same. I believe that for a phone with so much functionality, you've got to give your users a certain amount of customization options. Granted, some might argue that countless people stick with the same look of their computer OS for years without much complaint, but it's different because when using a computer, you're most focused on the applications, but I won't dabble into that right now. Having the same interface on a device that I use every day, have it on me most of the time, and navigate through tens of times a day, for two years (assuming it was acquired on launch), it is bound to bore a little, and I think one of the strong points of Android in general is the amount of customization you can do to the interface.

Now, that's my personal opinion, but I think that's one of the reasons WebOS for Pre and Sense for Hero have gotten so much hype design wise. When the iPhone was released, everyone was marveled by it's design, whose letterpressed fonts rocked the minds of even the least design savvy, if only subconsciously. It was revolutionary.

More usable and productive, maybe (I can't really say without using Sense myself). But the average Joe/Jane doesn't really pay attention to those kind of details. The average Joe/Jane will in fact look for the flashiest phone and OS so that they can show it off to the world. They don't care about how usable it is, and won't notice if it takes them a second or two more to see how many messages they've got. The power user might notice and appreciate this, but the power user is knowledgeable enough to choose the phone that suits them best.

Regarding themes, I don't have any on the iPhone. I don't need them, though I know many people who do and would love to be able to customize theirs. I won't dive into this much because it was just an idea I threw around without thinking about it much. I think apple designers wouldn't like having their perfected design redone.

(You're welcome, for the links ;)

[rufo]

Most people don't need a flashy new UI every year to stave off boredom - they want something easy to use and reliable. After two years navigating and interacting with the interface, it becomes second-nature.

This isn't to say refinements and improvements aren't welcome (which Apple has done with the iPhone), but a truly good design/UI will stand for years. (Great ones will last decades.) For another consumer-electronics based example, when was the last time Apple dramatically changed the UI on scroll-wheel iPods?

[jrockway]

I admit that your post was too long to read. However, I did notice the parts about the lack of logos on the iPhone. I located an iPhone and took this picture, comparing it to my HTC phone:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/really_jrockway/3671367456/size...

You'll notice that the HTC phone contains exactly one logo, a tiny HTC logo. The iPhone has the Apple, a note about where it was designed, a note about where it was assembled, and then a picture of some government agency's logo, a picture of a trash can with an X over it, another government logo, some random numbers, and an exclamation point surrounded by a circle. This doesn't matter, but it does mean your argument is incorrect.

I'll also point out that both phones have a number of buttons around on the side. The iPhone has the large, long connector port on the bottom and three buttons on the side. That is more than the "one button" that you mention.

[zimbabwe]

You know how I was talking about your habit of snarking pointlessly by taking things out of context? You're doing it again.

I pointed out the lack of logos while looking at the screen. Obviously an Apple product has a logo, on the back where the user isn't forced to look at it. I think the logo looks nice; some people disagree. But the point is that when you're staring at the phone to use it, there's a lack of visual clutter. The stuff that I don't constantly see doesn't matter. (I'll point out the inconsistency of the HTC design, with its completely unnecessary "3 megapixels" distinction, that plastic bump (is that for headphones?), and the generally odd feel of the items' positioning. The iPhone, on the other hand, is almost entirely centered, save the tiny camera hole appearing directly underneath the locking button.

My talk about the one button referred again to the front of the phone only. Using the iPhone OS, there is a total of one button you use to navigate. The other three buttons are insanely minimal in purpose: Two for volume, one for turning off the display. You know this, of course, but you've decided to snipe meaninglessly, as also you know that the connector port by no means counts as a button, and that even were you to count it as a button, the iPhone would still have fewer buttons overall than the Hero has visible on the front alone. I'd point out the feel of those buttons and how much poorer the buttons of the Hero look from the shots taken, but that's getting pointlessly involved in an argument we shouldn't be having in the first place.

I'm sorry my post was too long for you; if you'd like, tell me and I'll attempt to summarize my posts so you can legitimately join in this conversation.

[mcav]

Serious question: Does anyone have a good link to a more technical comparison of the iPhone OS, Android, and WebOS? Not necessarily the phones themselves, but of the current and future potential of those platforms? I've done a little searching, and there's a lot of information out there; maybe one of you has seen something more technical that explores each platform in more depth.

I'd love to support WebOS, but it's still incredibly young, and I'd hate to switch to a platform that ends up dead-ended.

[jmonegro]

http://lifehacker.com/5173441/android-versus-iphone-30-the-s...

less technical, but including webOS:

http://www.itworld.com/operating-systems/69907/smartphone-os...

[jrockway]

WebOS: Do whatever Palm says you can.

iPhone OS: Do whatever Apple says you can.

Android: Do whatever you want.