By - Jason Valalik
Now that some of the hype has died down I want to make a quick observation around the iPhone. Being a usability practitioner I tend to analyze things a little differently then the average Joe. We know that one of the most common places that mobile phones are used is probably in the car. Some states are banning this to some degree, but not completely so that environment will probably continue to be the place phones are used the most. The nice thing about current phones is that they have raised keys which allows our thumbs the ability to traverse the keyboard while not necessarily staring at the screen. We kind of half look at the road and half type in a number, message, etc. But if we needed to we could probably type in a number without looking at the keyboard. Now Apple has removed all landmarks and moved to a complete touch-screen user interface. This is going to require that the user looks at the screen 90% of the time because the landmark, raised keys, are now gone. This was one of the major usability issues with the first HTC smartphones. However with the upcoming release of Vox and other models they seemed to have alleviated that issue of needing to use the touchscreen for phone number entry. Not having the actual phone in hand I can’t say for sure if this is true.

I am just speaking from my experience with Smartphones in general. I think it would be an interesting usability test to compare users focus or how much they have to look at the screen with the iPhone compared to phones with keys.
My 2 cents.