Okay, okay…so I’m a little late to the party for the “N95 vs the iPhone” debate. Hey Blake, you say…2007 called, it wants it’s news story back.
Fair point. But while I’ve been using the iPhone off and on since August, it wasn’t until recently that I finally got my hands on an N95.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I should admit up front that I’m a huge fan of Apple. I’ve got an iMac at home, used a Macbook Pro at work for a long time, and there are at least four iPods in my house. If Apple was on trial, I would quickly be excused from the jury pool…but this ain’t court, this is the blogosphere and I can say whatever I want 
I’ll spare you an overly-detailed feature-by-feature comparison because it really misses the point. By now, you know that the N95 has every feature under the sun, while the iPhone lacks several (potentially) key things. After using both devices extensively, I’ve come to the following conclusion:
The iPhone is more than the sum of its parts while the N95 is less. With the iPhone, all of its features come together in a truly remarkable whole. It’s a joy to use. You can’t help but want to pick it up and flick thru a photo album or browse the web. The N95, on the other hand, has every feature imaginable, but the whole experience just misses something. The device is just a chore to use.
Nokia seems to believe that He Who Has the Most Features Wins. Cram enough features into a product and it will win out in the end. How wrong they are. Adding a feature that is hard to use and poorly implemented is actually worse than not including the feature at all. Apple knows this. Nokia builds features, Apple designs solutions.
This is a good lesson for me as a product manager. Identify a market problem or need and then design a solution for solving that need. Look out across the entire universe of possible features and choose only the ones that are necessary for solving the identified problem. Forget everything else.
Maybe Nokia will get it right with it’s upcoming Tube. For now, score one for the Apple in the Apple/Nokia war.
