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I would be remiss if I didn’t take some note of the block­buster iPhone intro­duc­tion this past week. Many peo­ple have already grown tired of this sub­ject (and I love Dar­ren Barefoot’s hilar­i­ous take on iphatigue.com), but now that this much-hyped device is out in the mar­ket (at least in the US), there might be some inter­est­ing things to take note of, as they relate to ‘the big pic­ture’ of Apple’s use of User Inter­face on mobile devices.

Before the iPod, Apple’s first take on a hand-held device, was the New­ton. The New­ton was far more inno­v­a­tive in some ways, at least in terms of a user inter­face , approach to the data (with a unique ‘data soup’) and how a user might inter­act with it. Here’s a Get­ting Started video for the New­ton some­one posted on YouTube:

The New­ton was about writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tions, but the user inter­face was also far more ori­ented toward a give-and-take inter­ac­tion with the user. For instance, you’d write ‘Lunch with Matt at 1PM on Fri­day’ in the cal­en­dar, and the New­ton would do it’s best to try and fig­ure out what you meant, putting a cal­en­dar entry ‘Lunch with Matt’ in the 1 PM time slot in your cal­en­dar. If you high­light someone’s name in a bit of rec­og­nized text, and then chose ‘FAX’ from the menu, the device would go to your FAX address book, do its best to locate the most likely per­son you were fax­ing to (by the first match from a find, in this case) and fill in the FAX num­ber in send box. These best guesses were not always suc­cess­ful, and in some ways, reflected in micro­cosm some of the worst fail­ures about the New­ton. By rais­ing expec­ta­tions about how much pseudo-intelligence there was in such a device, peo­ple were all the more angry or amused when it fell on it’s flat glass face. I had a New­ton, and although I was no fanatic about it, I always felt that it was falling just short of some truly amaz­ing feats of computer-human interaction.

Fast-forward to last week: Con­trast the New­ton Video with this more recent iPhone demo:

Where the New­ton video is more of a mar­ket­ing piece that tries to con­vince you of the device’s worth, the iPhone video is just a voyeuris­tic view of some­one using their iPhone to lis­ten to music, watch a video, cre­ate an ad hoc con­fer­ence call, send a photo in an email, text mes­sage some­one, lis­ten to voice mail, and use the Inter­net, etc.

The iPhone does not try to fill in the gaps, except where it knows such syn­er­gies can usu­ally work. For instance, in the Google Maps based appli­ca­tion, it allows you to dial what­ever busi­ness you locate on a map (if there is a phone num­ber). Where the New­ton pro­vided a some­what spooky inter­ac­tion with a ‘magic pad’ where the device would try and per­form com­plex tasks based on cryp­tic mes­sages from you, the iPhone puts it’s pro­cess­ing cycles into sim­pler, more phys­i­cal tasks , such as how to move pages around to sim­u­late the physics of the real world, how to flip the screen auto­mat­i­cally when the device is put on its side and how to dis­play lots of colour­ful icons and other pic­tures on a gor­geous screen.

The New­ton was ascetic and her­metic, the iPhone is gor­geous, and per­haps even a lit­tle gar­ish. Is the iPhone a step for­ward in UI Design? The New­ton tried to do far more with less, but clearly the mar­ket did not want that. The iPhone is far more about ‘the­atre’, which is why the voyeuris­tic demo works so well. It is also about apply­ing what has been learned in the desk­top and iPod world (set­ting wall­pa­per, cre­at­ing an email, choos­ing and play­ing a piece of music) and apply­ing those to a new form factor.

Although it’s arguable that the iPhone is less about really rev­o­lu­tion­ary think­ing about UIs (like the New­ton per­haps was), I think we may be ready for some of those. For instance, some­thing as sim­ple as voice recog­ni­tion of cer­tain com­mands should be doable on the next ver­sion of the iPhone, and syn­the­sized voice from it wouldn’t be bad, either. This has already been done on the desk­top, and since the iPhone is sup­pos­edly using the same OS, Apple (or other key third party devel­op­ers) should be able to port some of these tech­nolo­gies to this new hard­ware fairly eas­ily. I want to be able to say to my iPhone: “Make a con­fer­ence call between Pam and Matt” and have it call one, notify them of the con­fer­ence call and then con­nect the two calls.

Essen­tially, I want the pretty face of the iPhone with the brains (or bet­ter) of the Newton.