Only this morning I stumbled in this
Wired.com article about a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Apple against HTC, the manufacturer of the so-called Googlephones. This is an evident attack to Google's attempt to offer an alternative to the smartphone market. Reading the article, Wired's writers state that if Apple were to win in this confront, Google's inability to use certain technologies would make the Googlephones ugly, or not as pretty as the iPhone. This is pure nonsense. What is "pretty"? We think the iPhone is pretty, because it respects universal principles of design of uniformity, symmetry, softness and simplicity affecting our perception in a way we are not aware of. It is important, though, to distinguish pretty design, from dominant design, that is what the iPhone is slowly becoming. The QWERTY keyboard is an example of dominant design, but it certainly isn't prettier than the DVORAK keyboard. Pretty ≠ Dominant Design. Many pretty things didn't make it to the technology clash. Same holds for a misconception of the "first wins". Apple's pioneering technologies now look as the dominant design setters, the ones that know what's pretty and what is not. Unfortunately the mobile phone scenario isn't as simple as the previous sentence: there are
many different designs and control system that can fall into the beautiful and useful paradigm, the iPhone is only one example. That's all.
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