iSee thy iphone and iThink
Will my iWallet weather in iBlink

iDream thy iPod iHave will stretch
and into an iPhone will iMiracle create

Hey Steve iHope, iDream thy truth become
iDesire thy iPhone to be my one.

iHope thy wait will be iShort
iPatience can not uphold

Oh thy iPhone what have you done
An iChild and iDiot I have become

When you look at the iPhone, whatever you think about it - one thing can’t be ignored:

THE DESIGN IS NOT JUST THE SURFACE, ITS IN THE TOTALITY OF THE PRODUCT.

Noone can escape that notion. Just like fractals, the closer you look, the more evident the design DNA is.

Take the Motorola razor, the winner of numerous design awards and undoubtedly the phone that saved Motorola. The design of the clam shell is unique, the phone’s dimensions are impressive but when you look beyond the skin its shortcomings are in abundance - Motorola have failed to expand innovative physical design to the other ‘parts’ of the phone. Motorola traditionally deliver one of the worst graphical user interfaces of any mobile phone on the market today. There is a total disconnect between the shell (literally speaking) and the inside.

The revolution that Apple brings to the mobile phone industry is its TOTALITY, and its not ‘clam’ deep.

I sometimes look at the Razor with all its awards and think that Motorola might have fluked it.

Why? because it was inconsistent with anything they did in the past, because ever since they did it, their biggest innovation has been to change its colors, because its all about the clam and not about the GUI. It’s a very good design fluke.

Is the iPhone a fluke?

All of the lame prophets (myself included) of the iPhone imagined an iPod with a keyboard. We took two existing bricks (phone and music player) and imagined how they looked after a head on clash.

Apple’s approach was different. To come up with what we see today there must have been such a revisit to the whole concept of the cell phone, that the WHY’s must have been flying left and right. Why keyboard, why right, left,center key - why, why, why. And when the pieces were put back together (with talent of course) the outcome is as great as the guts it took to do it.

Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and company had more resources and time to focus on phones and yet what we see every year is an iteration on the year before. And when they do come up with something innovative (Razor shape), its good enough for them, they’ll take care of more innovation next year/release/model. They (mostly) treat mobile phones as plastic commodities that need better screen resolution and memory for the next release. in contrast and much like the iTune-iPod symbiotic relationship, iPhone is not only about the inside and out, they planed a whole eco-system.

Apple has yet to prove the iPhone is a big seller, have yet to prove its reliability as a cell phone, have yet to prove their sustainability in the mobile industry - that is in their future. What they have proved is that design and engineering should be and are meant to be one of the same. That separating the two creates less than perfect results.

Design is not king - Design-geneering is.