Review of the iPhone for the Economist, Written Jan 10 2007

With the iPhone, every mobile gadget has at long last merged into one. It is the world’s smallest wireless computer, and once again Apple have re-invented the way we interface with technology. My Blackberry Pearl has 29 keys and you need to use complicated sequences involving modifier keys to do just about anything. Getting rid of them all in one swipe, the iPhone has an interface that is digital in every sense of the word. It is a clever context-based navigational system that eliminates irrelevant choices and provides the intelligent and gratifying user experience we have come to expect from Apple. Finally eliminating intermediary input devices such as keyboard or stylus, control has become tactile again.

More importantly, the versatility that made the Palm devices so successful in the nineties, have with the iPhone moved portable computing into the 21^st century. Aiming to create a device for the future, Apple understood that any link in today’s technological ecosystem that can’t change, is only months away from the landfill. At the same time as this simple insight mercifully killed the physical buttons, it opened the iPhone for third party developers and an unlimited amount of applications.

I’ve come to love almost everything that Apple creates, but I am baffled by the lack of innovation from other companies. At the same time as they continue to raise the bar with innovative hardware and software, Microsoft is giving us … the Zune? Vista? A little competition in the field would be nice. Fortunately, Apple doesn’t really seem to need it to keep going and you can sense the joy of creativity in almost everything they do.

It will take some time before we’ll be able to put our fingers on the iPhone and truly put it to the test. My bet is that when it finally arrives, the cute and improbable interfaces that amused us so in Star Trek will get the last laugh. They may prove to be truly visionary. Now just beam me one.