BlackBerry: better than iPhone because you can use a smartphone like a laptop. Or something
BlackBerry chief executive officer Thorsten Heins has growled menacingly (well, spoken to some tech hack) about how RUBBISH the iPhone is and how AMAZING BlackBerry is. To be fair, it’s not like he’s the only CEO to do this, and Heins does at least give Apple device a backhanded compliment:
Apple did a fantastic job in bringing touch devices to market … They did a fantastic job with the user interface, they are a design icon. There is a reason why they were so successful, and we actually have to admit this and respect that
He then followed up with:
And that’s why, for the most part, we’re copying Apple as much as possible.
Ha! Only joking! What Heins really said is Apple is doomed, he tells you, doomed. Here’s why:
History repeats itself again I guess … the rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don’t innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly.
Ah, the old ‘Apple isn’t innovating but everyone else is—at light speed’ claim. Or, in this case, ‘Apple did innovate once, in June 2007, but has not remotely innovated since, the lazy gits’.
The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about is now five years old.
Which would be terrible if that were entirely accurate, because, as everyone knows, it’s much more fun when interfaces radically change every six seconds, rather than improving through gradual and reasoned iteration. I for one am looking forward to my BlackBerry car, which replaces the steering wheel with a gestural system that requires me to mimic exciting karate moves, and eschews a gear stick in favour of an innovative Whac-a-Mole system, which is “far more fun” than just yanking a stick.
Paul Smith, Financial Review’s scribe for the aforelinked piece stopped quoting at this point, but nonetheless summed up another Heins nugget:
Mr Heins said one area that the new BlackBerry phones had surpassed the iPhone was in the ability to multi-task—running multiple apps at once—meaning that users could work in the same fashion on their smartphone as they liked to on a laptop.
There’s part of a good point in here. iOS is great for focussing on tasks, and its ability to perform certain basic tasks (audio playback, say) in the background but freeze others so to not kill battery life is useful, but it’s clear some people need a more traditional computing experience while working. On an iPad, having two-up app views could definitely be handy for performing certain tasks, although the user interface could take a kicking from a simplicity standpoint. But here’s the bit where it goes a bit squiffy for Heins:
… users could work in the same fashion on their smartphone as they liked to on a laptop
How big are these new BlackBerry devices? Do they have a battery the size of a truck?
Different devices solve different problems, and although an iPad or other tablet can conceivably be considered a laptop replacement if you’ve the right apps and services, the mind boggles that anyone could consider a smartphone a laptop replacement. And even if you get pedantic and argue Heins was merely saying BlackBerry would allow people to work similarly to how they do on a laptop, user experience isn’t always (or even often) about giving people what they want, but what they need.
Then there’s the reality of the system’s multitasking, which, when you do a direct comparison, doesn’t appear significantly different from multitasking on competing platforms anyway. Versus iOS, it appears there’s more potential to keep entire apps running in the background (a battery drain), gestures to move between them (available on the iPad, but not the iPhone—yet), and live thumbnail previews in the BlackBerry’s equivalent of an app switcher (versus iOS icons in the admittedly not very discoverable and very basic multitasking tray—something Apple could do with improving).
So it’s not very laptop-like and, from what I’ve seen so far, is really a case of gradual and reasoned iteration—exactly what I like in technology. Quite why Heins felt the need to trash iOS and claim it never evolved, then, is beyond me.
Also, to all commentators that are yelling about how BlackBerry’s now going to give iOS and Android a kicking, you might be wise to realise that companies do not sit still and let rivals take a lead. You can bet if Apple or Google has some improved multitasking ideas waiting in the wings (and, in Apple’s case in particular, if they don’t compromise the overall experience of the system), we’ll see them soon enough; any lead Heins thought BlackBerry had will be short-lived. Still, at that point I’m sure we can look forward to tech hacks running with a billion stories a second on how Apple ripped off BlackBerry (and precisely no stories if Google does the same, because that doesn’t get people rapidly clicking on links, in order to get annoyed about what they subsequently read).
I think the car actually does have a pretty horrid user interface that is largely based on mechanical requirements that existed in the 18th and 19th century, but don’t exist anymore. If we were to design a car from scratch, attempting to come up with the best user interface possible, ignoring all of the existing investments people have made into learning how to use cars, and all of the current laws that require cars to follow pretty narrow design guidelines, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t put in a steering wheel, three pedals, and a gear stick.
I suspect that we’re using steering wheels and gear sticks because of laws, because of loss aversion, and because car companies are typically conservative, not because they’re the best possible solution to the problem of controlling cars. Since these forces are stronger with cars than with phones, I think it’s okay to assume that phones will evolve more quickly than cars.
(Although some of these forces do apply to some technologies. For example, the “huge upfront learning investment” force applies to typing. As a result, we’re still using qwerty keyboards.)
Personally, I love BlackBerry’s multitasking UI. I think of the currently available systems, BB does this particular thing best, hands down. The battery argument is valid in theory; in reality, though, my iPhone 4S often didn’t make it through the day on a single charge, while my Note II (presumably thanks to a bigger battery) does so easily, despite Android’s more permissible multitasking rules. iOS may have an advantage in theory, but if it doesn’t translate into a discernible practical advantage, it’s not worth anything to me as a user.
Because iOS so complex, right? It’s difficult to use the one-touch “open in another app” that automatically shows a list of compatible apps, or to e-mail a document by touching the E-mail icon and typing into the empty e-mail that pops straight up on the screen. Yes, you can’t see more than one app at a time, but iOS goes out of its way to make the process easier.
(Car controls should swap. Hand controls like a train for speed, foot pedals like a plane for steering).