14 DAY TRIAL // The thing that remained to prove the iPhone is a revolutionary piece of device is its multi-touch tactile user interface. This will probably be the thing to attract most of the buyers of the yet to be released Apple communication device but, as we have learned since it has been released, its interface is a thing extremely easy to copy.
At the beginning, there were the skins manufactured by some iPhone enthusiasts a few days after Steve Jobs presented the handset during its keynote at MacWorld. Those skins made Apple so angry that it made them put their lawyers hunt some of the people involved in spreading them across the web on numerous website.
Unfortunately for Apple, that was the exact thing that added the extra publicity it needed to spread on even more websites, virtually making Apple's efforts to remove the skins (and even the screenshots representing the skins) from the websites that hosted them to prove futile.
One on top of the other, although they didn't add any kind of functionality to the Pocket PC devices, the skins were distinctly resembling the user interface of the iPhone.
After the skins episode of the iPhone UI cloning saga ended, there came the time of the full featured user interfaces. The skins are long forgotten now because this new type of cloning flattery Apple faces practically copies all the things that made the iPhone interface so revolutionary, beginning with the multi-touch UI to the iPod music application.
The video demonstration shows an E-TEN M600 Pocket PC running a meddled-with interface which makes the handset look 99% exactly like the iPhone (if you ignore the exterior of the device of course :) ).
It even allows the user to interact with the touchscreen using its finger without any delays or accidental menu activation. Every shortcut appearing on the main menu launches a Pocket PC application closely related to the ones you could find on the iPhone and, the thing that left me mouth open, staring at the screen and rewinding the video to see it again, an integrated iPod music application.
At the moment, the guys that developed this interface have also made a scrolling list looking exactly like the one Steve Jobs used during its keynote to search for contacts on the iPhone. This scrolling thingie is still in the works and doesn't have any functionality (according to what the video tells us) but it will probably also be finished at a certain time.
This makes me wonder why would a Pocket PC user give up its handset in exchange of an overpriced iPhone when its own device can do everything the iPhone is able to? We're certainly going to see what happens next and if the guys that worked on this iPhone UI project will release it on the web for public use. If that happens, I predict a premature drop in the sales of the iPhone :).
To make your own impressions on how the real thing I was writing about here works, watch the video bellow.