Decide what to buy: the Reevoo.com blog

So, the iPhone is pretty sexy, sure. But is it easy to use? Looking around the office, I see quite a lot of bad postures and squinted eyes as people poke their touchscreens.

A gang of Swedish useability experts decided to compare the iPhone’s useability with three competing high-end phones (PDF report). They asked a group of five people to undertake several basic tasks on each phone after having had a chance to play with it for five minutes beforehand. According to the boffins, the iPhone’s interface blew the competition away.

The tasks were:

• make a call by dialing a number manually and then by calling a person from the address book,
• change volume during a call add a new contact to the address book,
• create a new calendar event,
• set the alarm,
• compose and send a text message,
• put the phone in silent mode,
• take a picture and send it to a person in the address book.

Interestingly, they didn’t test how useable the iPhone’s internet features are.

As for the results, four people were able to complete all of the iPhone tasks without any help, and four picked the iPhone as their favourite in the test. The runner up was the Sony Ericsson W910i. According to the Swedes:

In terms of actual performance, the iPhone clearly stands out!

Nokia’s N95 came in third and the HTC TyTN brought up the rear, with only one person able to complete all of the tasks successfully on the Windows Mobile-based device.

Apparently the key to the iPhone’s success is the touchscreen, which has "removed one level of abstraction", so you don’t need multiple buttons to do various parts of a task.

I’d be cautious about reading too much into these results though, which basically show the intuitiveness of the phones’ interfaces, not their long term ease of use.

That said, customers’ reviews of the iPhone do seem to agree with the useability test results, with the phone’s ease of use being given a 9.6 rating overall, and with 3 out of 5 comments so far specifically mentioning ease of use as a positive aspect of the device.

Personally, I’m still holding out for that price drop/3G.

Blog posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 12:35 pm under Mobile Phones. Leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.