iPhone buttons: less is more

From WSJ.com:

The new Apple cellphone famously does without the keypads that adorn its rivals. Instead, it offers a touch-sensing screen for making phone calls and tapping out emails. The resulting look is one of the sparest ever for Apple, a company known for minimalist gadgets. While many technology companies load their products up with buttons, Mr. Jobs treats them as blemishes that add complexity to electronics products and hinder their clean aesthetics.

The spirit of simplicity extends even to Apple retail stores. The elevator in Apple's popular Tokyo store, for instance, has no floor buttons. It stops on every floor of the four-story building. "I got used to this," said Hiroshi Kawano, 40-year-old employee of a printing firm, on a recent visit to the store. "It's simple, and I like it."

At an Apple event two years ago, Mr. Jobs mocked the complexity of traditional remote controls for consumer-electronics products, including "media center" computers designed by Microsoft Corp. and its partners. He showed an image comparing media center remotes that had more than 40 buttons each next to a new Apple remote control for playing movies and music on Macs. The Apple remote had just six buttons.

Users often seem to quickly adapt to quirks in Apple's designs. When the company introduced the iPod in late 2001, the most common calls to Apple's technical support lines for a time were about how to turn the device, which lacked a clearly defined power button, off and on, says a former Apple executive.

When asked on stage at a recent conference sponsored by The Wall Street Journal whether there was any debate internally about the decision to include a virtual keyboard with the iPhone instead of a physical one, Mr. Jobs had a suitably minimalist answer.

"None," he said.