« I’ve been waiting two and half years for this moment” were the words of Steve Jobs as he launched the iPhone at his global keynote speech in San Francisco. So had we all, the rumours of Apple’s entry into the mobile phone world had been around just as long, to the point were we thought they wouldn’t do it all. But suddenly it was here and within hours the share price of Nokia and Motorola had taken a severe thump downwards as the world collectivly gasped at the cool simplicity and elegance of Apple’s solution.

As Jobs said in his intro, “if you want to do great software, you have to start with hardware”. Apple have taken this literally with every major product innovation; the Macintosh with a mouse, the iPod with the wheel and now the iPhone with our natural pointer, our fingers. In each case, they have stripped our preconceptions of what a product should be and gone back to first principles. What do you use it for and how do we really want to use it.

The iPhone does this again. In competing with industry giants such as Nokia, who sell in vastly greater numbers than Apple, mainly because the network operators hide the true costs of handsets through subsidies, Apple thought out of the box. iPhone is a screen you touch, with an interface that concentrates on doing stuff you actually want to do and no more, beautifully. It’s design is almost invisible, the camera a simple hole in the back. It does things conventional phones don’t even think about, like allowing you to connect two calls with exquisite simplicity, or go directly to a voice message, without having to listen to a voice mail  box  telling you how many calls you have and then listening to each in turn.

We know that only 10 percent of phones functionality is used. We know that most people hate the way their phones work. Even Nokia, the worlds favourite phone brand, suffer from returns due to people not being able to use them. And yet, in the mobile phone world, usability means revenue. Some phones are used 5 times more than others for texting, simply because they are easier to use. For the operators, this means income. Usability is not just a nice to have.

But despite the importance of usability, manufacturers have been unable to step outside their boxes and take the perspective that Apple have. They insist on confusing soft keys, tiny navigation cursors, strange icons; inconsistent meaningless and infuriating terminology, the seperation of physical form and on screen interface. Into this myopic, technology and feature stuffed madness, Apple have cast  light that will make others cower.

Of course Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and the rest massivly outsell Apple. And of course this expensive, possibly fragile but impossibly cool iPhone will not make a significant dent into their market performance. But they need to watch out, people will see that it doesn’t have to be the way it always has been. The mighty Microsoft will admit to the impact of Apple on the quality of PC software. Now the phone manufacturers will be forced to respond, to think out of the box and remember that it’s not the technology, it’s how you use it, that is everything.

There are people who get bored with those who praise Apple. They can show you countless products that have more features, to a higher specification and at a lower price than an Apple. You can have what ever you want in a mobile phone, a music player, TV, internet, Instant Messaging, but that is not the point. Apple have shown us yet again that it’s how you make it work that makes the difference. So the iPhone is important, it shows that there is another way, you can design and innovate to achieve that thing that technology never provides, simplicity, joy and beauty, the greatest drivers of commerce and success. But most companies, struggling to find their imagination, tied to feature led competitor matching with little effort to gain insight in to what their customers actually want, and frozen in collective inability to strike out,  will be scratching their heads wondering how to do it better, but at least they have something to copy now.