Actually no, its not really the OS behind it either. Its the usability concept of the phone that determines it all. Same goes for the applications that resides on the phone as well, its the usability of it that determines the success. The OS and the available SDK's role is just to help make life easier for the developers.

Actually no. You're mixing up the differences between the various layers here. At the very core, the OS is just the OS, where it enables something to run. The user interface is something that is built on top of the OS, where if you mess this up, you mess up the entire thing. The OS allows for the user interface that you see to be created, but that's about it. Try playing around with Xcode's Interface Builder, and you'll find that without the right amount of planning put into your interface design, you can still very much mess up the usability aspect of any application that you wish to build.

What I'm really addressing here is the misconception that as long as the OS is done properly, that's all there is to the usability aspect of it, but there's much more to it all than just the OS. In fact, try hunting through Apple's developer documentations, and you'll find one long and very complete document dedicated to just user interface design guidelines, of which shows the importance of not relying too much on the OS' looks and feels to do everything for you.

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Added on July 5, 2008, 11:12 pmhere's something else to think about as well. even if the iphone has got a relatively stable OS, but uses the same sort of user interface as symbian or winCE, you'll still run into the same sort of complains.

This post has been edited by fyire: Jul 5 2008, 11:12 PM

well, if you all think that the multi-touch interface on the iPhone is great, you'll have to realize that Apple's only currently scratching the surface of what's really possible with multi-touch.

Check out this presentation from a researcher at NYU:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_ha...ouchscreen.html

And at the same time, do keep in mind that that presentation was done back in 2006 too.

Remember Iron Man the movie, with the 3D CAD system that he was using to design his armor? Multi-touch is merely the first step in making such interfaces possible, as you'll first need to have a user input system that accepts multiple points of differing types of input (such as movement direction, movement patterns, pressure, etc) simultaneously.

This post has been edited by fyire: Jul 7 2008, 12:26 AM