How do you spell greatness? I-N-N-O-V-A-T-I-O-N

At the risk of increasingly turning this blog into a forum to air my Apple opinions I have been forced to yet again blog on Apple. Yes, I am being forced to do this!

I’ve been pouring over the new Microsoft Windows Phone 7 reviews with quite a bit of interest. It is so fantastic to finally see some out-of-the-box thinking again coming from Redmond. It appears that they’ve completely rethought the way in which users use their phones and how to create a user interface that best aligns with what users want to do. Their past windows mobile iterations were, frankly, awful. They were awful simply because Microsoft has gotten away with continuing to take a desktop user interface and stuffing it into yet another form factor. No thought to how and what the user will be doing only that there should be a start button and right button menus, etc.

Along comes the iPhone, designed from the ground up to be a killer phone user interface and all of a sudden there’s new life around cell phone innovation. We now have a Palm Pre, Touch versions of RIM, Android and Phone 7. The only company that seems to be fighting innovation tooth and nail is Nokia. They have the most to lose but seem to spend the least amount of time thinking about how to design a better phone.

Another interesting example of this mind boggling behavior is around the tablet / netbook. With the introduction of the iPad, so many (Microsoft-centric) vendors crowed about how they had tablet computers and how the market wasn’t that interested or how the Netbook is the next tablet, etc. Firstly the original tablet designs were examples of Microsoft stuffing the same old Windows into a new format. It didn’t take into account user habits or better interface design. As a matter of fact, having used a few different ones, I always hated trying to hit the menu bar with a little pen. This was not only difficult but completely counterintuitive. (Along the same lines, how many of you hit the ATM keypad in your grocery store with your fingers before you pick up the pen in frustration. Why in the world I need to use a stylus to peck out my pin number is completely beyond me?!) The iPad will drive further innovation in the tablet space and I expect that Microsoft will introduce a new interface for tablet computing by 2012...

The Netbook is yet another interesting device. This is a cloud computing personal notebook. A laptop form factor optimized for web services. It has a keyboard and a laptop screen. Using existing GUI-based interfaces similar to (or exactly like) existing laptop user interfaces makes perfect sense. However comparing this device to a tablet makes no sense what so ever! I’ll just continue to scratch my head over those comparisons.

In summary, I’m not necessarily an Apple Fanboy (and I won’t even consider the iPad unless it has a web cam for video conferencing -- which I consider the killer app for me on the device) but I tip my hat to Apple every day for making the rest of the technology / IT world restless. If it wasn’t for the iPod and the unique iPod interface we’d still be using Sony MP3 players. What a disaster those were. If you don’t believe me I have three to give away... let me know where I can ship them...