The iPhone interface is certainly revolutionary but there's room for another player in the mobile GUI marketplace. I'm not sure how you could make money with this, but it's something useful that users want, so YC would say you can figure out how to make money with it later. Probably by licensing the interface to the major cell phone companies, they're going to want to catch up to the iPhone.

I love the look and feel of the iPhone UI but there are some niggles. The phones main 'dashboard'/start screen wont scale. Every app is an icon on a grid. As soon as you have more applications than screen space there are going to be problems. It's interesting to see that apple also has a poor application launcher UI (fidner) on mac os x too. I wonder if someone will be foolish enough to create a quicksilver equivalent for the iphone?

I think the challenge here is not to match the iPhone's interface, since that would require matching the iPhone's hardware.

What would be better is a plug-in-able OS that would make the RAZR's menus tolerable (and maybe could be used on phones with even worse hardware).

The RAZR is quite locked down. I tried to create a better UI for it [this was several years ago when I had a RAZR. worst mobile UI ever] but the problem is that the only way in is to create a java app that has to be launched by the user. This java app is hidden deep inside the menu system your trying to fix.

Nokia S60's on the other hand are a dream to customise. I'm working on a new application launcher for my E61 right now and the difference is stagering. Being able to run python on your phone rather than java or C++ makes development tolerable. Hopefully nokias widgets coming this year will allow access to phone APIs from JS/CSS/HTML, then mobile will be as easy as web apps.

rms: how did you find out about this page?

It's on pg's index.

You mean a manual crawl through http://paulgraham.com/ind.html ? I've often wondered how all the stuff there is organized. New essays we can find out about, but how is one to know when something else is added to this index?

There's no date on the link, so it's not clear how recent it is.

Yeah, I just went through most of the index by hand, mostly for the purpose of submitting here. I'm an addict.

It could be bigger than that. I think it'd be huge if someone came up with some phone interface that didn't suck that could be found on the more common, more affordable handsets.