Our phone is most definitely not an iPhone

I think some iPhone competitors are getting it all wrong. How? By poising themselves as just that – and, quite specifically: nothing more.

Even if you dislike it – and many people, at least in theory, do – it’s hard not to recognise the incredible success that iPhone has had. I believe that this is justified. iPhone has been the first significantly successful, mass market, and truly smart ‘smart phone’. It’s the first phone to make having a web browser on your phone actually attractive or useful.

RIM, with BlackBerry, was (and is) successful in an entirely different way. BlackBerrys are great, perhaps perfect, devices for business people – this is the core of the product, and this is obviously what RIM started with. In fact, one of the minor but significant bonuses of your business phone being a BlackBerry was that it didn’t have any sort of camera, meaning that there was no need to hand over your phone in confidential places (like factory floors, certain departments of head offices, etc.). So BlackBerry is fantastic at email. But iPhone were the first to do smart phones for everybody else properly – I still think one of the biggest selling points of iPhone is Mobile Safari.

Sadly, like I’ve said, many of the (already merely reactionary newer phones) are positioning themselves as nothing more than ‘not-iPhones’. The most glaringly, staggeringly obvious is Motorola’s Droid. You only have to read the advertising copy to see what I mean:

Should a phone be pretty? Should it be a tiara-wearing digitally clueless beauty pageant queen? Or should it be fast? Racehorse duct-taped to a Scud missile fast. We say the latter. So we built the phone that does. Does rip through the Web like a circular saw through a ripe banana. Is it a precious porcelain figurine of a phone? In truth? No. It’s not a princess. It’s a robot. A phone that trades hair-do for can-do.

(You can read about this advert here and watch the advert itself here.)

Of course, this is also precisely the fashion in which the Droid first introduced itself to the world; with a parody.

Now, I do want to be clear here: I’m not objecting to direct, even harsh, comparisons between competitors. Not in a general sense, and not with iPhone. For one thing, Apple could hardly complain about being directly compared and criticised without being massive hypocrites. Attacking rivals can be a very positive thing (although not the best strategy; especially in an innovative market like this, or in the long-term, but that’s another issue), but only, I feel, when your product is very distinctive. These adverts don’t allow them to be.

So what does this leave us with, as consumers? A Motorola robot-phone that is very much aware of its own ugliness – and apparently proud of it, thank-you-very-much. Its web browser is fast? Well, so’s my iPhone’s. What else? Well, we’ve got RIM flailing around trying to bridge the gap between what it’s very good at and what the iPhone is very good at. Leaving us with ugly icons and multi-touch that they haven’t quite mastered yet. Or, worse; totally embarrassing monstrosities of careless design.

That’s the biggest problem of all: this advert isn’t the actual problem, but merely a symptom. Manufacturers for this market are now either trying to squeeze a grid of square icons onto the front screen of their phones (mindlessly assuming this is the secret to the success of iPhone?) or attempting to be different, and ending up asserting themselves as nothing but ‘certainly not an iPhone’. The former is thoughtless and lazy, but the latter is worse, because it reduces the proposition to a dichotomy – which is not only boring, but can only serve to stifle innovation.

In short: Motorola ought to Think Different™.