How do you compete with the iPhone? Very badly, it seems.

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On January 9, 2007, at Macworld Expo, Apple announced the iPhone. If you're feeling nostalgic, watch the video or read the coverage from Engadget.

"Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything." —Steve Jobs, Macworld Expo 2007

Apple showed a complete working device, completely integrated, already useful. It shipped just 5 months later, on June 29, 2007, and worked as shown.

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So now it's 2010, three years later. The iPhone rules the world. Today, Microsoft finally announced (but did not ship!) their response to the iPhone: the ZunePhone. No, "Windows Mobile 7". No, wait, "Windows Phone 7 Series". Even for Microsoft, that's a terrible product name, but totally to be expected. I'm going to call it "ZunePhone" here, for brevity.

The interface is… horrible is too kind. It's Zunetastic! See the slideshow on Engadget. The big areas are the "hub" UI, basically a desktop-sized area that you scroll a teeny little phone viewport into. Every task will involve scrolling, scrolling, scrolling around.

It's a stark contrast to an iPhone UI, which is laser-focused on the minimal content necessary for each step, then presenting another panel for more detail. The iPhone UI is the epitome of Chris Crawford's "tunnel bored through solid rock".

Like the Zune, the ZunePhone uses a wafer-thin white font on black or picture backgrounds, causing eyestrain. Colorful icons & pictures look good on black backgrounds, but text you should focus on does not. White text on black slips into background; that's why it's used in games for notifications, but not usually for readable dialog! Text is completely unreadable in any color over a photographic background. Reading a contact list over a background picture is crazy!

It's "normal" on the Zune and ZunePhone to cut off text. Their own promo image shows "Februar", not February!

Apple announced the iPhone with no games, no 3rd-party apps, only web apps, but quickly got the message that Mac developers wanted access, and got the iPhone SDK out. But that's Apple, which is somewhat developer-hostile; surely Microsoft, who loves 3rd-party developers, will do better? Nope. No 3rd-party apps, no games. There was a demo of Xbox Live stats checking, but nothing about playing games. Nothing about writing games.

There is a Zune HD SDK, and maybe it or something similar will work on the ZunePhone; but nobody has developed anything serious for the Zune HD, and Microsoft's "app store" apparently doesn't pay developers, so I doubt if anyone will bother. The development environment for Zune HD is C#, XNA, and Visual Studio crap, so making attractive apps will continue to be impossible. Can nobody take a single hint from Xcode and Interface Builder, or HyperCard back in the '80s, and make a good GUI design tool? Apparently not.

I can go on, but this is just an accumulation of incompetence. Microsoft tried to innovate with the Zune HD interface, I will give them credit for that, but it was a bad design, and they're just making it worse on the ZunePhone.

The punchline to the whole affair is, this is a demo only. There's no shippable phone yet, Microsoft still has to get mobile carriers to make phones using it, and ship them, and doesn't plan to do this until "Holiday 2010", which in Microsoft scheduling means spring 2011. THREE AND A HALF YEARS after the iPhone shipped, MS may have shipping ZunePhones which are ugly, but functionally equivalent to those first iPhones.

But the iPhone hasn't stood still since then. In the years since release, the iPhone OS has gone from a simple launcher for a handful of Apple apps to a very powerful and easy-to-use environment for 3rd party apps. The interface has been refined, and expanded into the iPad's much larger screen. Programming for the iPhone is years, decades ahead of programming for any other mobile device.

Microsoft aimed squarely at the past, and hit it. That's just not good enough anymore.

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The other mobile phone failures today are from Nokia and Intel.

Nokia's merging their Maemo OS with Intel's Moblin, and calling the result "MeeGo". Gibberish names, for gibberish ideas.

The "MeeGo" OS is still programmed with Qt/C++, just like any other crappy, ugly Linux & KDE app. Manual widget layout, menus with keyboard shortcuts, manually placing "Hello MeeGo!!" on the screen! It's like it's still 1995. There's 6 lines of code to make a menu with a button that does something, and another 6 to place a label. In the iPhone SDK, both can be done in Interface Builder with 0 lines of code.

You do need to write code for more complex behavior, but even there it'll be 10% as much as in C++, because Cocoa does the tedious wiring for you, and you trace out connections in IB, you only do actual logic in Xcode.

Anyway, this doesn't really matter, since MeeGo won't ship until "second quarter of 2010" according to their FAQ, and that probably means a usable version in Q3 2010.

Nokia also has Symbian^3, which is their old shitty phone OS with ugly, complicated C++/Qt apps on top. Apparently failing to compete with just one OS isn't enough failure for Nokia, they want to fail to compete on multiple fronts.

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Google's Android is marginally better technology, but not particularly good, and the apps are just as ugly as any Linux app. As a market, Android is a shithole, already splintered into dozens of incompatible hardware designs, OS versions, and carrier-specific app stores. Every time a new Android phone comes out, e.g. Google Nexus One, Motorola Droid, HTC Hero, and so on, their platform is balkanized just a bit more, so nothing works.

Palm's WebOS is the one exception, the only company that actually made something artistic and creative and NEW, that competes with the iPhone by attacking its weaknesses instead of me-too-ing its features, badly. The Pre has the best multitasking design of any portable device, the notification system is awesome, the devices look and feel great. The original Pre & Pixi were on Sprint, and I'll never give those sons-of-bitches my money again, but I may pick up a Pre Plus for development.

The quote below is about the iPad, but applies just as much to the iPhone, the iPod (only Microsoft is so stupid as to continue competing with the iPod, so badly as the Zune), and the Mac:

It's got to be so annoying to compete with Apple, at anything really, because it's not like they're doing something fucking crazy. Everybody's had these ideas before. The difference, and this is grim if you are a competitor, but the difference is that everyone else spends a lot of time (and often, money) determining why those things aren't possible. And then it comes out, for real, only you didn't make it. Some other guys did. And when you come out with what is (on paper) a better version of the same thing, maybe even multiple times over, it's too late.

You made a "product" to compete with their "product," tastefully arranging your regiment, only to discover that they hadn't made a product at all - they made a narrative. A statement about how technology should interface with a life.

I'm not saying this to be mean, or get my kicks, or to engage in psychic vampirism. Competing with these fucking people must be a genuinely harrowing state of affairs.

—Tycho, Penny Arcade, 2010 Jan 22