IPhone - A waste of space

Don't get me wrong. I love my IPhone. It has all the functionality that I need to retrieve information and to communicate with other people. Plus a whole lot more: a camera, calendar, maps, Ipod, YouTube, weather etc. My previous phone, a Sony Ericsson, is light years behind IPhone when it comes to usability. The touch screen is surprisingly easy to use. You almost don't even have to read the manual to get started using this device. The user interface is so slick and utterly well designed that every task you perform becomes joyful. To put it shortly, it's a hallmark of design by Apple.

According to the technical specification for IPhone, the height is 4.5 inches (115.5 mm) and the width is 2.4 inches (62.1 mm). It has a 3.5-inch (diagonal) widescreen with 480-by-320-pixel resolution at 163 ppi. Nothing strange about that. But take a close look at the back side of the IPhone here beside. It looks slick with the rounded corners and the silvery Apple logo. But what else? Really, it's just an empty black plastic surface which gives the user no value at all. Zero, zip, zilch, nada. To me that seems like a great waste of space. A mobile device of the future needs as much space as possible to squeeze in functionality and content. Instead of using the total area of the both sides together (143.4 cm²), IPhone is only using half of that. I'm going to try to find out possible usages of a double sided mobile device. To be continued.

images courtesy of Apple Inc.