The Obligatory iPhone Post

I'm going to channel Navin Johnson for a moment... "The new iPhone's here! The new iPhone's here!"

No, really. The iPhones are here. What? I'm a week late, you say? Maybe. But I finally laid my hands on one of these beauties yesterday and, honestly, it is all it's cracked up to be. Not perfect, to be sure, but the interface – the breakthrough element of this product – is outstanding. You only need to handle an iPhone for a short while before you realize that you're dealing with The Next Big Thing™.

The interface carries intuitive design to an entirely new level. Granted, considering the pedigree of this product, an intuitive interface was always a given. But this display invites itself to be touched and manipulated, and it responds instantly to your every gesture (or at least it seems that way). As you poke at the display with your fingers the image reacts with no hesitation – point to am album cover and it fills the screen; push the virtual album away and another rotates into its spot; grab a small piece of an image or a Web page with your thumb and forefinger, and spread them wide to magnify, then squeeze your fingers back together again to see it all. You don't have to learn this interface – you already know it from a lifetime of manipulating physical objects.

But what really grabbed me about the iPhone interface was that last feature – the way it smoothly and intuitively allows the user to magnify or reduce an image. Sure it's useful for seeing that individual smile in a group photo, but what it's really good for is allowing a user to navigate through, and read from, a fully detailed Web site on a 4" screen. Small displays have always been a problem for the oft-promised Ubiquitous Portable Computing Device™. There's a great big Web out there, and most of it doesn't fit onto a Palm sized screen. But it would if you could easily manipulate the image and use the small screen like a mobile window looking onto a WWW landscape. With a simple gesture you can see the entire page and then just as easily zoom into the image or text to examine it more closely. And it responds as easily as if you were dragging a piece of paper around a table – assuming that sheet of paper could instantly morph into any other piece of paper in the world and then expand and contract to whatever size you needed at the moment you needed it.

As exciting as this is it really isn't new - it just hasn't been commercial until now. I saw an image magnification interface, or something very much like it, a few weeks ago. Clay wrote about Microsoft's recent acquisition of Seadragon. If you don't get tingles from watching the Seadragon demo and recognizing the very real possibilities for an entirely new kind of interface control system, let alone a new way of organizing data, then you sir are no geek! To be sure, Seadragon and the iPhone interface are not the same thing - not even close - but they represent compatible methods of visual organization that I think we're going to be seing a lot more of very soon.

Anyway, the iPhone definitely represents Something New™. You may not need to run-right-out-and-buy-one-now, but I promise, we'll all be using that interface, or something very much like it, before too long.