I don't have an iPhone. Don't plan to get one either until Apple releases an SDK. Sorry, web based apps just don't cut it for everything.

But the glowing reviews of the user interface got me thinking. The last time I remember hearing people talk like this about using a computer device was about six months ago when I was reading about the Wii.

Both systems have "natural gesture" interaction that are pretty different from systems that have come before. Nintendo has things a bit easier in some regards with the Wii because its either simulating a physical movement (e.g. swinging a tennis racket) or creating an entirely new one (e.g. Mario Party). Apple had to figure out a way to turn physical gestures into an abstract concept (e.g. scroll left) on the iPhone.

Both appear to have the quality without a name which results in an extremely satisfying user experience.

I think these two systems represent the start of the next phase in human computer interaction. We've been waiting for a way to break away from keyboards, mice, and joysticks and we might be on our way now. Admittedly, things still have a long way to go. Speech recognition isn't quite ready for prime time yet, and the iPhone isn't even a tablet PC yet. Still, I'm optimistic.

Back to that SDK for the iPhone: what I find really fascinating is how these new UI techniques will affect the future of development.

Suppose tomorrow Apple released a tablet computer with all of the gesture interaction from the iPhone, plus more. Developers would be falling all over themselves to build the next killer app that uses this new input method.

Is it too early for Web 3.0? Would the browser support these new gestures? Isn't it possible that some standard for UI on the web would be needed? New HTML tags or javascript onEvent or something? The first to market would probably go a long way to setting those standards. If it was Microsoft, they might do their usual embrace, extend, and extinguish techniques to stifle the competition.

It could also mean new dominance in the desktop OS space. For some time now I've believed that the web has made the desktop OS mostly irrelevant. A new UI that uses gestures and natural physical movements could change all that. We could see a new desktop monopoly, perhaps by Apple, perhaps by Microsoft. Perhaps even by some new OS startup.

And that should make Google slightly afraid.