Maven Mapper's

Apple always tries to make their products more intuitive and cool.  They seem to have missed the boat on a lesson that was learned many years ago by Palm.  So here's my free tip to Steve Jobs.

Handheld users like keyboards.

There are many reasons why people like keyboards, one of the reasons is so that they can feel the keys with their fingers.  Fingers are those long skinny things that hang at the end of the your hands.  They have a bunch of nerves in the fingertips that enable people to feel things.  They can feel things like buttons.

If you have a device without a button, your finger can't feel it.

IPhone has no buttons and so your fingers won't be a little feel it.  That means you'll always have a look at your iPhone whenever you want to do something.

That brings up the second problem,

it's called Grease.

I'm not talking about the musical and I'm not talking about the movie and it has nothing to do with John Travolta.  I'm talking about the grease that comes off of your skin and rubs onto the side of your phone.  If you wear makeup, that I'm also talking about the makeup nor rub off on your phone.

It gets kind of hard to see your phone if you've got grease all over it.  I already mentioned that with the iPhone it's very important to see your phone because you can feel your phone.

Then there is a third little problem comes in to play as well and it kind relates to being able to not see your phone.  You see when you have a mobile phone there's this thing that tends to happen to the mobile phone that obscures the screen over time. 

It's called scratches.

Mobile phones get scratched, it happens to all phones.  People are hard on their mobile phones.  We carry them in our bags, our backpacks in our pockets, our belts.  We throw them in our cars and on her desk and on her nightstand and in tables. 

I still have some left over screen protector things from the 90's.  They were not cool, they were down right dorky but necessary if you didn't want to scratch up your $500 palm.  Kind of like the pocket protector I guess.

They fall off of things and slide across floors and across parking lots.  For those of us with kids, our kids tend to slobber on them and scratch them and play with them.  Regardless they always get scratched.  Now if you can't feel the buttons on your phone because there are no buttons then you have to see to use the phone and if your phone is all scratched up and if it's a little greasy, you might have built a see what you're doing and perform a right function as easily. 

You'll have to stare at the phone a little bit more and a little bit harder.  You may wonder why the big phone manufacturers aren't too concerned about the iPhone.  The reason is that they learned all these lessons along time ago.  Don't get me wrong they had to beat beat over the head with a stick a bunch of times to learn this lesson.  Palm almost went out of business because they had a hard time learning this lesson, and only learned after they brought the Treo line of phones back into the company. 

The special thing about the Treo was its keyboard.  Before the keyboard people used to have to use the silly little adhesive stickers that went on a Palm to keep it from getting scratched and to keep it from getting greasy.  Of course they also obscured your view of the screen and made it that much harder to see what you're doing.  And putting a plastic patch on your cool iPhone like you might put a birth control patch on your girlfriends shoulder just isn't that cool.