• Business Week, Friday, January 12, 2007 11:31 AM

Buying a new cell phone is a real pain. Just think of the unappealing store fronts, the confusing carrier plans, long lines on weekends and generally poor customer service. Handset makers can do nothing about this, since the carriers control the sale of handset makers' products, as well as the network they run on and the services they offer.

Relinquishing this kind of control certainly doesn't sound like Apple or Steve Jobs, but that's exactly what the iPod maker is going to do when it starts selling its iPhone over the Cingular Wireless (soon to be jus AT&T) network.

Jobs and Apple will have no control over how users cope with AT&T, but it will have control over how pretty and how good its iPhone interface will be. The latter is crucial to the success of Apple's new product. Pretty phones--like Motorola's Razr--have come and gone. Ultimately, they live and die by their user interface.

It's a good thing this happens to be Apple's specialty; indeed, many believe the iPod won the music market through a combination of its sleek look and its intuitive usability. The iPhone promises to offer much more, including a Mac operating system and the elimination of the many modifier keys that make it difficult to use a Blackberry. Says deisgn guru Jakob Trollbäck: with the iPhone, "Control has become tactile again."

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