I often find NPR’s reporting on science and technology to be boring, stale, and months late. That is why I was surprised to hear Laura Sydell’s report about the iPhone on yesterday’s Morning Edition.

Sydell rightly declared that the key to Apple’s success with the iPod and its potential success with the iPhone are a result of a seamlessly integrated interface. In other words, Apple’s real innovation, well beyond design and marketing, was creating an easy to user interface that brought information literally to the fingertips of the users. As someone who as owned a number of non-Apple MP3 players, I can emphatically state that, based on their extreme clumsiness, it really must be difficult to design a device that works as intuitively as the iPod.

Why, you might ask, is it important to have seamlessly integrated interfaces? The short answer is: the impact of the information revolution will be blunted if that information isn’t more easily accessible.

Perhaps better interfaces are one (small) way that we are narrowing the gap between the digital and real worlds (see previous post).

Anyway, the highlight for me (other than NPR’s actually getting it right for a change), was an interview with a cell-phone insider who described how phone designers have been pushing for button-less phones for a while, but the corporate boss-like stiffs keep saying no. Well, now no longer.

If you use Real Player you can listen to Laura’s story here.

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