We all have seen the teaser ad for the new LG Cookie where the girl uses her fingers to operate the phone. The Cookie is the newest phone to jump onto the touchscreen phone bandwagon, where your fingers now replace the stylus; it will shortly be launched in India. The UI of the Cookie is designed to be completely finger-friendly with clickable on-screen buttons and icons on the home screen, which can be moved around with the swipe of a finger. We have also been seeing touchscreen phones from Nokia, such as the eagerly awaited 5800 XpressMusic and the N97, which also focus on finger-based navigation. So where did this sudden trend in finger-based touchscreen navigation in phones come from? Who exactly is responsible for bringing about this welcome change? Well, the Apple iPhone, of course.

 

The Apple iPhone has changed things in the touchscreen phone arena. In fact, the touchscreen phone period can be split into the 'Before iPhone' and the 'After iPhone' eras. Earlier, we used to have small resistive touchscreens with a 4:3 aspect ratio, which were operated with the stylus provided because the on-screen buttons were too small for anything larger than a stylus tip. Now, we see large 3.0-inch+ widescreen displays with high resolution meant specifically for operation with your fingers. Now, post-iPhone, everyone has realized that the human finger is the easiest means of operating a touchscreen interface (you don't have to worry about losing your navigational tool, as was the problem with the stylus). The interface designs are much more user-friendly, with slick animation added for good measure. The iPhone has served as a wake-up call to manufacturers and taught them how a touchscreen phone ought to be.

 

 

 

So, now, suddenly, we have a slew of touchscreen phones imitating the Apple iPhone, the so-called 'iPhone Killers', and we are not just talking about Chinese companies (there is no shortage of them as well). We are talking about major mobile phone manufacturers, the likes of Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, and HTC. All of them have entered the touchscreen phone fray with at least one model in their product portfolio fighting head-on against the Apple baby. Each one promises more than what the iPhone offers, and that too at a lower price! But then, why haven't they succeeded? Why is Apple's iPhone still going strong? Why is it out-selling longtime players such as the Blackberry and the Windows Mobile phones in the US, going on to become the number one phone selling in the US? What is it about the iPhone that has charmed millions, and why are the iPhone wannabes not getting the same love and affection from the public?

 

Well, the reason is simple. They are not better than the iPhone, not in every aspect at least, no matter what their manufacturers might tell you. Whether you pick the Samsung Omnia, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1, or the HTC Touch Diamond, they are still not as good as the iPhone. They all offer what the iPhone lacks. They have higher resolution displays, they have higher resolution cameras, they offer better battery life; in fact, they offer everything that the iPhone fails to, but they all lack what the iPhone has.

 

It's surprising how none of the major manufacturers haven't got this into their heads so far; the iPhone was never just about the display or the camera. It's about the finger-friendly capacitive touchscreen where you don't have to use force, but just have to glide your finger on the screen for the phone to recognize your input, which is just not possible on the resistive displays of other touchscreen phones. It's about realizing the importance of the 'User' in the User Interface and designing it so well that it would go on to set a benchmark. The iPhone's interface is not just about the fancy animation that other manufacturers have mistakenly assumed to be an important feature (wasting no time in adding it to their phones), but about how incredibly easy it is to use, so much so that even the most technologically challenged person could adapt to it in seconds.

 

It's about the design, where it was not just about having a large touchscreen, but doing away with physical buttons as they waste precious space. It's about the whole iTunes eco-system where you can manage everything related to your iPhone from one place, adding music to it, updating the firmware, converting videos, or syncing with your Contacts. It's about the App Store where you don't just allow your users to install 3rd party applications onto their phone, but also give them a one-stop store to shop for the applications instead of hunting around at different places for them, unlike other operating systems. Apple's App Store, where the applications are checked beforehand to completely remove your chances of having malicious content enter your iPhone and which lets you rest assured knowing that there are people out there who do the dirty work of sorting and rating the softwares and games for you, is a major brownie point in iPhone's favor.

 

 

 

But, most importantly, the iPhone is about the out-of-the-box thinking that Apple is renowned for. They don't follow popular trends, they make them. Apple could have just launched any other standard phone and made money out of it, but they chose to be different from the crowd, and made the iPhone. The 'iPhone Killers' have a lot of features that the iPhone lacks, but none of them have what the iPhone has, or the inexplicable something that made it what it is today. The iPhone might not do a lot of things the 'iPhone Killers' do, but whatever it does, it does it better than any phone out there. In fact, you can't even call these phones 'iPhone Killers'. The true 'iPhone Killer' would be a phone that would combine the qualities of the iPhone with the features that it lacks.

 

The new LG Cookie is another shot to topple the touchscreen Goliath. Whether it will succeed is something only time (and our full review) will tell. Right now, the major trump card that the Cookie has is its mouth-watering price, around half of what the iPhone costs. We'll wait and see whether this Cookie will be a hit or will just crumble like the many others before it.