Apple unveiled the much anticipated new iPhone 5 at an event in San Francisco today. The device has been hotly anticipated but the majority of the new features shown off on the device such as the larger screen, lighter body, thinner frame, faster processor and LTE support have been pretty well anticipated leading up to the event.
The iPhone 5 will be available for pre-orders beginning September 14 and will begin shipping and be available in stores on September 21. “iPhone 5 is the most beautiful consumer device that we’ve ever created,” said Philip Schiller. “We’ve packed an amazing amount of innovation and advanced technology into a thin and light, jewel-like device with a stunning 4-inch Retina display, blazing fast A6 chip, ultrafast wireless, even longer battery life; and we think customers are going to love it.”
iPhone 5 comes with the following improvements from its predecessor, the iPhone 4S, which has sold close to 100 million units since it was introduced:
Larger Screen (A longer screen: 4 inches diagonally as opposed to 3.5 on the iPhone 4S, with a higher resolution, at 1136-by-640 pixels, compared to the iPhone 4S display’s 960-by-640 resolution.)
Lighter (By 20 percent, now 112 grams.)
Thinner (By 18 percent, at 7.6 millimeters.)
Faster (A new A6 chip, or processor, which Apple boasts delivers “up to twice the CPU and graphics performance.”)
Slightly improved camera (A sapphire crystal lens and improved stabilization.)
LTE wireless connection support (Take advantage of the higher-speed 4G LTE networks)
New iOS 6 software will improve Apple’s digital assistant Siri, allowing users to check in on sports scores, receive turn-by-turn directions using Apple’s map system and post updates to Facebook by speaking into their phone. Additionally, iOS6 adds Passbook, which is Apple’s new e-tickets app, enabling you to carry electronic tickets for anything from sports events to plane travel, or to have a digital loyalty card. Another key feature will be an improved phone app. iPhone app developers will certainly be digging into the many advances with iOS6 to assist their customers in creating cutting edge applications that utilize the expanded powers of this operating system.
Based on the most recent numbers from Nielson, half of US mobile service subscribers own a smartphone and each of those, on average, has 41 mobile apps on their device. This is a 28% increase over the previous year according to Nielson, so its pretty easy to see that there is some fantastic growth with regards to mobile application sales. Especially when you take into account the incredible growth in terms of the number of smartphones sold.
Another factor of this survey that stands out is by how much users prefer native mobile applications to html5 applications. Users will spend a great amount more time on a native app than they will on an html5 application. Clearly in most situations, building a native application is still the best choice for now. Nielson’s report also highlighted the incredible growth of this industry in terms of handsets. Right now there are a total of 84 million Android and iOS users in the US and that is more than double the number from just a year ago.
Studies like these tend to punctuate the need for businesses to address how they can leverage mobile apps or they will soon find themselves on the outside looking in. Well conceived and built mobile applications are regularly used by savvy consumers and provide a great way to access an audience that is often turned off by traditional media.
While no company wants to be know for selling products that are functional and unattractive, we are seeing strong evidence that aesthetics don’t affect a mobile app or web site’s perceived usability. But conversely, poor usability will negatively affect the application’s perceived allure.
In a recent study conducted by Google, they stated:
“The results showed that the beauty of the interface did not affect how users perceived the usability of the shops: Participants (or Users) were capable of distinguishing if a product was usable or not, no matter how nice it looked. However, the experiment showed that the usability of the shops influenced how users rated the products’ beauty. Participants using shops with bad usability rated the shops as less beautiful after using the shops. We showed that poor usability lead to frustration, which put the users in a bad mood and made them rate the product as less beautiful than before interacting with the shop.”
Often we see businesses acting counter to this with by placing aesthetics far ahead of usability. As they design, they often do everything to stand apart from other applications and focus too much on the surface level design factors while ignoring real usability issues that would help increase user satisfaction and repeat usage.
To counter this, we suggest users pursue design paths for mobile and web applications using aesthetic attributes such as “clean”, “tight” and “organized”. Applications generally gain traction from the ground up and add more users as positive word of mouth spreads, which means reputation is everything. The study suggests poor usability will lead to less than favorable word-of-mouth will good usability while help you see the growth you desire for your applications.