Courtesy of Gizmodo.com

Gizmodo has a nice overview of a topic I’ve been considering for quite some time: the complexity of Japanese cell phone interfaces. This is an issue that has seemingly plagued these phones for quite some time, but has recently been thrust into the limelight by a certain touchscreen phone designed in Cupertino.

Now, if you believe the rumors of the iPhone’s $150 million development cost, my guess is that most of that cost was not for the hardware design. It would not surprise me if the majority of that cost was for engineering the iPhone’s software stack.

This scale of expense begins to make sense when considering every layer of the iPhone–its OS, through the application UI and graphic support layers, to the apps themselves– are engineered for user experience first.

Seems obvious at first, but this type of no-compromises design approach to even the smallest details of the iPhone software experience has enormous ramifications on the customer’s emotional connection to the product. Imagine having a discussion with a software engineer to create the “jiggle” effect on the iPhone’s home screen icons on a “normal” product development cycle. Without the enormous investment in the iPhone’s software stack that makes this feature possible, it makes complete sense why this level of detail hasn’t made it into past products.

So now, as with whenever a paradigm-shifting product appears in the market, the industry will play catch-up.

http://gizmodo.com/5069366/why-zen-software-design-does-not-come-from-japan

PS: Don’t want an iPhone? Get a CiPhone!