Nokia Taunts Apple with New "Open to Anything" Ads

Nokia appears to have gotten its dander up over all the attention the iPhone is getting compared to its new N95. Over the weekend, New Nokia "Open To Anything" ads appeared in New York.. The basic argument: the best devices (i.e., Nokia's) have are open and have no limits while Apple's iPhones do.

It's a very civilized ad, and that may be its weakness in actually getting attention. After all, do most consumers care about "openness" when the vast majority only make calls on their phones? And as far as being taunting goes, I don't think this riposte goes nearly far enough to be regarded as taunting. Perhaps the best example of a truly aggressive tuant was immortalized in Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" upon IBM's introduction of its Series 1 minicomputer. Data General created a ad consisting of a picture of a Data General Nova minicomputer and a bold headline that read:

They Say IBM's Entry Into Minicomputers Will Legitimize The Market. The Bastards Say, Welcome"

Too bad that ad never actually ran. But in today's Halo-inspired trash talking society where as many as 65% of US phone users still never do anything but make calls on their phones, that 30-year-old ad might have garnered more consumer attention than Nokia's appeal to embrace downloadable software openness. Or here's a radical idea: maybe Nokia could makes its phones easier to use.

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Apple, iPhone, Nokia, N95

Four -- actually make that five -- quick reflections on how my iPhone outshines my Nokia E61i

Blogging should be back now; I republished the entire site last night, and whatever problem I was having yesterday seems to be better now (knock on wood). I must say, I hate these "in-the-cloud" services when things go wrong and there is no one you can talk to debug it.

Thanks to the generosity of a reader (Thank you so much! You know who you are!), my own 8 Gigabyte refurbished iPhone arrived yesterday. And while I don't have much to add to the stream of reviews out on the Web, I do have a few observations because I've just spent two months sparring with my Nokia E61i:

• Physics makes the iPhone interface feel real. We expect physical simulation in a video game, but not in a phone interface. But when you flick scroll lists on the iPhone, they bounce off invisible stops at the end of the list. When you flick through photos, they slow down and come to a stop as if you flicked a photo across a desk. All this video-game-like simulation adds to the sense that you're interacting with real media, not an electronic simulcrum. The Nokia? Physics is just not in its software vocabulary.


• Black on white text rocks. This is a little thing, but after reading my emails and texts as white text on a blue dotted background, I now find the iPhone black on white and gray on white text so restful and comforting. I feel like the iPhone is a first class email and Web client instead of an approximation.


• iPhone typography is gorgeous. While the Nokia occasionally uses multiple font sizes, by and large, everything is 9 or 11 point ugly face type. It has little or no anti-aliasing, so it looks oh-so-computery. The iPhone, on the other hand, uses size of type for design and readability impact. Web pages and emails on the iPhone look like printed documents, not computer-rendered imitations.


• YouTube is watchable!. As a guy who actually did some video in a past life, I find a lot of Internet videos unwatchable, especially because the Flash-encoded versions render it so badly. Because the iPhone uses a H.264 video encoded version of YouTube instead of the lame Flash version, many (but not all) videos that come from there actually look better than they look on a computer. Browsing YouTube becomes much more like channel surfing on TV instead of feeling like I'm looking at an Internet peep show.


• The polish of the interface creates a very high touch experience. Many aspects of the Nokia E61i -- particularly the music and video player -- feel rather ad-hoc and tacked on. On the iPhone, I get the impression every single touch, icon, and animation was designed to create a specific user response. The result: I feel like the iPhone rewards my effort to work with it, while the Nokia feels more like a collection of partner software slapped together.

Now that I've activated my iPhone on my family ATT account, my unlocked Nokia phone is now emulating a brick, since the phone number attached to its SIM is now on my iPhone. So I decided to take advantage of its strength: the fact that there is software available to customize it. So I've downloaded the Gizmo Project IP phone software onto the E61i, done some reprogramming of it, and repurposed it to my younger son David, who isn't yet ready to pony up $30 a month for a cell phone service plan. So now, he can make and receive calls from us on his Gizmo number, send and receive email, and even get voicemail via his email account. It only works when he's in range of a free WiFi network, but since his school and many of his friends have them, that may not be as much of a restriction. We'll see as he works with it.


The bottom line: I've enjoyed the pride and joy my son has experienced by saving for and buying his own iPhone. But I can now say from a day's experience, owning an iPhone is an even better experience and a rare delight. And describing it just doesn't do it justice.

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Apple, iPhone, Mobile phones, Technology, Usability, Design

Usability data proves that Apple's iPhone really is better

I've been claiming that the iPhone's usability is the keystone of its market appeal for a while. Well, ComputerWorld now has some hard usability study data to back that claim up. They had Perceptive Science, a usability consulting firm, pit the iPhone against a Nokia N95 and the HTC Touch (which is a Windows Mobile 6.0 device) with 10 consumers:

The company brought in 10 testers who had never used any of the three devices. It then asked the testers to perform a series of tasks on each device with quantifiable results, such as the time needed to find and use the on/off switch. Other tasks included setting the phone to vibrate, making a call, saving a phone number to the contact list, sending a brief e-mail, taking a photo and finding a Web site using the device's built-in browser.

Based on the test results and on Thornton's and Ballew's observations, each phone was given a score of between one and five (five being the highest) in each of five categories. In addition, each phone was given an overall score.

It's important to remember that these are usability tests, not tests of functionality. Perceptive Sciences took a broad look at the features on each phone, but largely as they related to usability. For instance, the Nokia N95 is justly famous for its strong feature set. But did that feature set contribute to overall usability, or detract from it?

It's also important to remember that the tests focused on how easy it was to pick up the device and use it right out of the box.

"People can eventually learn to use any device," Ballew said. "But that's not true usability. We wanted to see how long it took to figure out how to use the phones. That's the difference between learnability and usability."

The results

Let's cut to the bottom line: In terms of usability, iPhone blew away its two competitors. Its overall score in the usability tests was 4.6 out of 5. The HTC Touch was a distant second at 3.4, and the Nokia N95 scored 3.2.

"Testers were [typically] about twice as fast doing specific tasks on the iPhone, which is pretty remarkable," Thornton said.

Twice as fast. Yow. So it's not just me that finds the iPhone so much more usable than other phones.

The one other tidbit I loved was how long it took ordinary people to turn on WiFi on the Nokia N95:

"It has a really nice feature set," Ballew said. On the other hand, he stressed, its strong feature set contributed to its relatively poor usability scores in previous categories.

"It's right on the verge of feature bloat," he said. "I mean, I'm not sure when I'd ever use the bar-code scanner. And some of the features are hard to set up." In particular, Ballew said it took four hours to set up Wi-Fi on the N95, which was a fast, simple task on both the HTC Touch and the iPhone.

Didn't I say that the Nokia/Symbian networking was broken?

Nice job ComputerWorld. Now iPhone owners have some hard usability data to back up what Steve Jobs said in his iPhone introduction keynote: Consumers hate their mobile phones because they are just too darn hard to use. At least they were until Apple introduced the iPhone.

Technorati Tags:
Apple, iPhone, Usability, Nokia