Constant Touch (13 page)

In
2003, an innovative company launched a smartphone that would prove to be a great hit with consumers, who so loved the look and feel of the device that they became engrossed in their own world with it. Soon the company was riding high, with more and more customers signing up every day. But it was not to last.

The company was Research in Motion and the product was the BlackBerry. The Canadian firm had built two-way pagers in the late 1990s, a modest hit. But their BlackBerry smartphone of 2003 proved to be the breakthrough. It was a handheld, intimate phone with a basic black-and-white screen. It was the size and weight of a pack of cards, held horizontally. So far, nothing unusual. But the BlackBerry also had a well-designed miniature QWERTY keyboard, over which thumbs could rapidly and easily flick and press. When combined with its other outstanding feature, a secure channel for email, the BlackBerry provided an extraordinarily powerful device for keeping in constant touch with work. BlackBerrys were very popular with big organisations, and many government and corporate employees received them as part of the job, along with the expectation, as with early analogue cellphones, that the ‘dead time' of travel and leisure would now be spent
to the employers' benefit. This expectation was met. The ambitious saw the BlackBerry as a tool to work hard. The device had to be checked every spare minute just in case a key office manoeuvre or managerial decision was missed. Never turned off and always to hand, intensifying the trend of transferring work into the home, it is no wonder that the device was dubbed the ‘CrackBerry'.

The BlackBerry was very successful in its niche as a personal portable email browser and telephone. It also became curiously popular with teenagers, who were attracted by a free direct messaging application that came rolled into the device. But there were plenty of other smartphones around in the mid-2000s, as a flick through a contemporary Carphone Warehouse or Phones4U sales brochure proves. There are products from Motorola, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Dell and Palm, among others. While there was quite an exciting diversity of design – with flip-up covers or keyboard wings – the overwhelming look was of shiny chrome, plastic casings and tiny buttons crammed around screens. They were chunky and ate the battery before breakfast.

Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, loathed them. ‘We would sit around talking about how much we hated our phones,' he said, as his biographer Walter Isaacson records. ‘They were way too complicated. They had features nobody could figure out, including the address book.
It was just Byzantine.' But smartphones, which as intimate personal computers could do so many tasks, were also a threat to Apple. The company had watched as the camera phone had eaten away at the market for digital cameras. Soon smartphones playing digital music might sweep away the mp3 player, including Apple's own iPod.

The way that Apple responded to this threat drew deeply on the values held by the company since its earliest days: a perfectionist focus on well-designed products, a desire to frame the users' experience on Apple's terms, and a closed and controlled approach to innovation. Quite unexpectedly the iPhone, embodying these values, would demonstrate that the ‘walled garden' approach to mobile culture and business, which had failed with WAP and never left Japan with i-mode, could succeed. The Apple story is well known, but a brief retelling will remind us how deep and consistent these values have been.

Apple was born in California, for good reasons. The west coast of the United States, and California in particular, had benefited from the industrial expansion of electronics during the Cold War. Missiles, aircraft and big mainframe computers all required smaller and smaller electronic components. The integrated circuits produced by Fairchild Semiconductors were designed in Palo Alto. Nearby, the older firm Hewlett-Packard, started in 1939, had grown to be a big local employer and,
crucially, trainer in the skills of electrical engineering. Around town there were plenty of people tinkering with electronics in garages in the evenings. When the first microprocessors – computers on chips – went on sale in the mid-1970s, the Californian tinkerers enthusiastically played with them, exploring what they could do and demonstrating their achievements at venues such as the Homebrew Computer Club. Soon the more skilful amateurs built these chips into rudimentary small computers, and these were even sold in kit form to other enthusiasts. One partnership that formed around this micro business was between Stephen Wozniak and his friend Steve Jobs. Woz was the talented hacker of electronics, capable of sustained bouts of engineering and programming. Jobs was the fixer, securing deals for the chips and caring about the design, packaging, peripherals and sales. Their first Apple was a kit computer, distinctive only in that it could be plugged into a TV, that sold to a handful of people in 1976. Their second, the Apple II, on sale the following year, was the Apple values made manifest: a personal computer with innovative features (such as colour), designed with careful attention not only to outside looks but also to the internal architecture, and sold as a general consumer device. Six million were eventually shipped.

The Macintosh, or Mac, of 1984 continued this pattern of selling slightly high-end, well-designed personal computers to those who saw themselves as creative
and discerning. Whereas IBM would license out its schema for a personal computer to any manufacturer, resulting in a flood of cheap and cheerful, but often ugly, desktop machines, the Mac was produced to Apple's design by Apple alone. Whereas the word processing and operating system software for the clones was generally Microsoft by default, due to its dominance in the market, the software on Apple computers was by Apple's invitation only, and usually done in-house. This closed approach meant that software and hardware could be carefully designed together for maximum efficiency. With little waste, Apple could get the most out of the machines, which in turn meant that the Mac could run visually impressive software – not least the icons, mouse and windows interface inspired by Xerox. The lesson was learned: close control over hardware and software led to efficiency of product design which made dramatic new features workable, which in turn attracted custom.

Steve Jobs prized these values. When he was forced out of Apple in 1985 the company drifted and its market share eroded as other companies caught up – not least Microsoft, which offered its own Windows operating system for PCs, replacing its inscrutable text-based MS-DOS. Nevertheless Apple did launch one of the first ‘personal digital assistants', the Newton, in 1993. These were limited notepad computers in which a stylus could tap and write on a screen. When Jobs returned in 1996,
and then took over as CEO in 1997, he returned the company to the values exemplified by the Apple II and Mac. Fun and funky design, for example, marked out the iMac, a colourful fat wedge-shaped computer launched in 1998. (The name iMac, which would of course be echoed in the iPhone, was one of five monikers pitched by the ad firm TBWA\Chiat\Day. Jobs disliked them all at first.) More significant, though, was the launch of the iPod in 2001. This digital equivalent of the iconic Sony Walkman distinguished itself from the host of mp3 players already available in two ways. First, it was fantastically cleverly designed, thanks to Jonathan Ive: the iPod was an otherworldly thin white block with an intuitively simple ‘dial' interface. Second, the iPod worked with iTunes, a piece of software that acted as both online market and personal music library. It locked listeners into a closed world, saved the music industry, which was panicked by illegal downloading and sharing of music files, and made Apple another fortune.

Apple dipped into the mobile phone business tentatively at first. In 2004, Motorola, the granddaddy of handset manufacturers, had launched its Razr, a slim clam-shape phone that sold well. Jobs and the CEO of Motorola, Ed Zander, agreed an unusual collaboration: in 2005 the Rokr phone appeared, essentially a Motorola phone with iTunes preloaded. Users had something like an iPod and cellphone in one. Motorola gained
by tapping the popularity of iTunes, while Apple could experiment with the cellphone world in a low-key way.

Somewhere in the secretive back-labs of Apple's Cupertino headquarters, the plans for the iPhone were begun around early 2005. There was clearly a lot of experimentation. This behind-the-scenes activity was only accidentally revealed in 2012 when an Apple vs Samsung patent dispute obliged Apple to describe its process of design. ‘Some of the early prototypes of the iPhone are bizarre,' reported Nick Bilton in the
New York Times
:

One, a long black rectangle, looks as if it is twice the size it should be. Others have beautifully curved glass screens. Another resembles an old silver iPod that just happens to be a phone, too. And there's the strangest of all: an iPhone that looks like a stretched hexagon made of cheap black plastic.

For a while two candidate iPhone designs were seriously considered, one a kind of iPod phone, with a trackwheel, and the other a rectangle with a touch-screen interface. The ‘multi-touch' screen was the first of the great innovations introduced by the iPhone. The choice was made by Steve Jobs, who favoured simple, clean design and loathed extraneous buttons or, worse, the
stylus. ‘God gave us ten styluses,' his biographer reports Jobs repeatedly saying, ‘let's not invent another.'

Think about how you use an iPhone. There is one button on the front which simply calls up the main screen. You can swipe to the left, dragging your fingertip across the screen, to move and see other apps. The four apps at the bottom remain the same, and remind us what the main features of these smartphones are: a phone, a music player, a mailbox and an internet browser. If I want to choose to do something, I tap one of the tabs. Sometimes I push with my finger to scroll up or down. Sometimes, and this is very clever and intuitive, I zoom in to something by spreading my fingertips apart. I zoom out by pinching the screen.

Yet when I rush off and throw my phone in my bag, even though it jostles with pens and books the phone does not accidentally ring my aunt or delete my mail. The phone screen is sensitive to live fingers and not inert objects. All this cleverness is possible because the iPhone screen has several smart layers. On the outside is tough glass. (It is called ‘gorilla glass', and had been invented – but never developed further – by the Corning company in the 1960s. It is now one of Corning's main products.) Sitting on the glass is a nearly invisible grid of fine electrical wires. You can glimpse this grid if you give the screen a good clean and then peer closely at it under a bright light. The lines are about a millimetre apart. One line carries an electrical charge, while the other
detects the slight disturbance caused in the electrical fields as your finger, acting like a weak capacitor, swipes the screen. By arranging the lines in a grid the position of your finger, and whether it's moving in a particular direction, can be measured. The computer in the iPhone then figures out what these prods and swipes might mean, and launches apps or changes the screen accordingly. It's very fast and very smooth, and it means that the whole hardware of traditional phone interfaces – the physical buttons – can be ditched in favour of software and virtual buttons. Apple at first didn't know how to do this. But one company that did was FingerWorks, a spin-off from the University of Michigan. Apple snaffled the company up in a low-profile purchase in 2005, importing the crucial knowledge, skills and patents of the FingerWorks inventors.

The other great innovation of the iPhone was the ‘App Store'. Apple's fans had become used to the idea of shopping in a secure online space though iTunes. With applications, or ‘apps', users could buy and download pieces of software. In the first iPhones the purchases were made through iTunes, but later models had the App Store as a preinstalled tab. As with iTunes, Apple hosted the market, took a cut of the revenue and acted as a gatekeeper. Any company producing apps would have to secure approval from Apple, which in turn set the bar high, making sure that running the app would be fast, free of bugs and not interfere with the smooth operation
of other iPhone programs. Nevertheless, from Apple's point of view this very slight opening up of the iPhone represented a significant risk, and ran against the ingrained values of the company.

Users accepted the restricted choice in exchange for the implied guarantee of quality. In fact they seem to have greatly enjoyed playing in Apple's walled garden. The App Store has been extraordinarily successful: from 500 initial apps in 2008, users in the summer of 2012 had a choice of 700,000. By then over 30 billion apps had been downloaded. Apps come in all different kinds. There are apps to translate languages, design tattoos, teach you to drive or be your personal trainer. Almost all media, from traditional print newspapers to Twitter, have made apps their interface. But the biggest sellers – and the apps that have absorbed most of our time, so far – have been games, such as Rovio's Angry Birds and Halfbrick Studios' Fruit Ninja.