Reinventing the phone
Could a telephone be any more beautiful than the iPhone? Doubt it. Even Jakob Nielsen, the guru of usability, is charmed with it. "Apple's new iPhone finally does what I said in 2000 to 'Kill the Telephone Keypad.' It only took 7 years for somebody to try, but the other phone vendors can't say that they weren't warned."
One of the technologies wowing those who have seen the iPhone involves being able to enlarge or reduce an image on the screen using your finger. That's the brainchild of Jeff Han of the Department of Computer Science at New York University. His "Multi-Touch Interaction Research" is all about "Bi-manual, multi-point, and multi-user input on graphical interaction surfaces". Although it's going to "cost us deep in the purse", as the old song puts it, Rainy Day will be an iPhone user by the end of this year.
But we have been warned. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes asks: "How the heck are you going to protect that touch screen? That's a big area to protect. At best, screens like this are vulnerable to being cracked by bending or flexing, and being a touch screen it has an added dislike of being poked or scraped by sharps (the surface of the touch screen is glass). " Ooooh. That's a good point. The Rainy Day iPod looks pretty shabby now because of the beating it's been given. But won't the fact that the iPhone is a thing of beauty force ruffians like ourselves to finally become more caring, gentle people?
