Form trumps function

The iPhone may have changed the face of wireless more than we know. Despite its many lauded features, the iPhone is a really a triumph of design rather than technology, according to some of the leading user interface development companies in the world. What's more, the rest of the industry is starting to follow Apple's cue, focusing on the form of the device as opposed to its functions.

“In the past, the hardware had always been the issue — the challenge was just getting it to work,” said Charlotta Falvin, CEO for Swedish user interface design firm The Astonishing Tribe. Once the challenges were overcome, though, the industry went hog wild, putting every imaginable feature into the device. “It's possible to put too much functionality into a device; it becomes overwhelming to the user,” she said.

Despite all of the iPhone's capabilities, its components are rather basic. The first release used a 2G chip, its camera wasn't that impressive, and its e-mail and messaging capabilities were about average. Apple, however, stole the show with its impressive browser and touch-screen user-interface design. It took functionality long available on hundreds of millions of phones around the world and presented it in an intuitive and creative manner, bringing millions of new mobile Internet users along for the ride.

The innumerable copycats that have followed the iPhone have tried mainly to emulate its design, not its technical capabilities. As a result, the industry has started to see a lot more data and multimedia usage on platforms less than state-of-the-art. It isn't that handset vendors are abandoning technology, said Travis Beaven, vice president of consumer products for UIEvolution. Technology is now being used to realize particular design and user experience aims, rather than just being used for its own sake — in fact, design can compensate for less than state of the art if done right, Beaven said.

“Every phone doesn't need to have super-rich animations on every screen,” Beaven said. “It just has to look clean. You can still have good design without a Pixar-level of quality to graphics.”