This post is inspired and adapted from one of the stories in the book ‘The Big Moo‘, a collection of thoughts, ideas and stories from 33 contemporary business thinkers and edited by Seth Godin.

If you look at the comparison of the iPhone with some of the “iPhone killers”, you will find that in terms of technical specifications, many phones seem to be able to beat the iPhone black and blue. Other phones have a higher camera resolution, a higher resolution display and support for greater data speeds. iPhone lacks a removable battery and does not support MMS, voice dialing, stereo bluetooth, A2DP or even video recording -features which some of the phones priced less than half the price of an iPhone might also have.

And yet, iPhone is selling more than any other smartphone (Apple has sold 13 million iPhones till date, 6.89 million of which have been sold in Q3 2008 alone).  It is unreasonable to expect that so many phones have been sold just because of the aura that people associate with brand Apple. There’s more to it.

The quality of the user interface which is hard to measure and quantify is the the key factor here. The ease of use and the intuitiveness of the user interface on the iPhone is so prominent and unprecedented that it dwarfs the shortcomings of the iPhone. But, just because the usability of the user interface is hard to measure, doesn’t mean it is not important. In fact, it is so important that users the world over have spent more than a couple of billion dollars in less than a couple of years in buying these phones.

It is tempting to focus on things which are easy to measure instead of things that are important to measure.

Disclaimer: I do not own an iPhone or the iPod touch.