Category: innovation & new stuff

The other day my 2 year old son suffered a surprising recurrence of separation anxiety.

Usually he waves me off to work for the day with a kiss and a hug but this morning he really didn’t want me to go. 

Something was different this time. In the past, it was me he was going to miss. This time he didn’t want me to take my iPhone away for the day.

Shock, horror! Toddler addicted to iPhone! Parent supervises children between tweeting and emailing! Technology is so evil, right?

Well, you tell me. The reason he didn’t want me to go to work with my iPhone is because he had such a great time the previous evening learning about numbers and letters thanks to the great applications from Montessorium. (No, I’m not on commission – I just love, love, love their applications and the amazing learning experience they’ve provided for my son).

My son has been using my iPhone since he was about 8 months old. Firstly to listen to nursery rhymes (he now knows and sings more songs that I ever knew, including the second verse of Twinkle Twinkle – who even knew it existed!), he has great fine motor skills honed by playing with Peekaboo Barn (his first iPhone application), later followed by a selection of the great apps by Duck Duck Moose (we started with Wheels on the Bus but our current favourite is Itsy Bitsy Spider). My son can find The Wiggles, Pingu and Peppa Pig episodes on YouTube on the iPhone unaided (although, I hasten to add, not unsupervised).

It’s been with these Montessorium applications that I’ve really been in awe of the power of technology, good design and passionate teachers as I’ve watched my son, already quite interested in numbers and letters, become almost obsessed with them.

Not only does he only ever want to play ‘the numbers game’ or ‘the letters game’ on my phone, the whole world has become his playground as he’s suddenly found himself surrounded by numbers and letters that mean and do different things and create all kinds of new meanings in his life.

Meet him this week and there’s every chance he’ll ask you ‘what’s your number?’ (code for: how old are you – we’re still working on manners!) or ‘what’s your letter?’ (which means, what letter does your name start with).

Better still, as the apps are aimed at children slightly older than him, he needs help with parts of them, creating a beautiful opportunity for social learning mediated by my iPhone.

Everyday he’s creating a more compelling use case for me to buy an iPad without waiting for the second generation to be released. And, as I have a second son rapidly approaching the 8 month mark, he’s also creating a compelling reason for my husband to ‘need’ an iPhone – have two boys, need two iPhones.

Sure, everyday I try to be disciplined about not constantly checking email and Twitter over the heads of my children but I’ve found that by relinquishing the device to the kids and letting them become addicted to learning, it seems to work out very well for all of us.

What a great follow on from my previous rant on mobile UI – go read Steve Jobs’ overview of what he thinks of the current breed of mobile phones and how fun they are (not!) to use, and what Apple have done about it.

This *has* to be the most lust-worthy device on the planet at the moment. I’d trade my Nokia N73 in a heartbeat for one of these.

What’s so cool about it?

• it’s beautiful. When was the last time you saw a beautiful mobile UI? (I can hear you saying ‘never’ from here). The interface design is sexy. Lustworthy. Typical Apple.
• it’s gestural. There’s one button, a home button, and your fingers do all the rest of the work. Check out the ‘slide to unlock’ in the image above. Forget millions of tiny buttons – you have the interface you need at the time to do the job you’re doing (because this puppy is a phone, an iPod and more!). Forget styluses – they’re a pain in the neck and get lost all the time. Fingers are the input device of the future.
• it’s aware. It has sensors that tells it whether you’re looking at in in portrait or landscape mode and it adjusts accordingly. It knows when you’re using it as a phone and shuts off the interface. How clever!
  
• It does all the work for you. Sometimes it’s the simple things that count. Having spent hours and hours configuring and setting up my new Nokia N73 to utilise all the stuff that’s installed on it and some of it’s capabilities. How much easier is the Apple approach where the device does all the work for you.

Oooh! and that Google Maps integration… I love it. Why didn’t we think of that already?
For a long time, usability and design people have been debating about whether or not people want ‘convergent’ or multifunctional devices. Is it possible for one device to be able to do many different things well? Or will a device always be primarily one animal that has some capabilities in other areas.

Apple has just made that debate completely redundant.

And the crazy thing is that the whole approach is so incredibly obvious. Look at the task that the user is trying to achieve and design the interface to support that. By removing the nightmarish restrictions of the hardware and replacing it with one big, responsive screen, Apple has shed all of these restrictions and with it, all the things we thought to be conventional about mobile phone design.

Sign me up. I want one now.

The only thing I’m a little sad about is how much of a fuss Steve is making about patenting all the cool things they’ve developed for this phone. More than 200 patents.

That’s not very caring, sharing 2.0 is it? (Of course, Apple shareholders might see this somewhat differently).

Check out the keynote for yourself at Engadget (brilliant live coverage, well done!)

(image credit to Engadget also).

So – what do you make of the iPhone?

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