Apologies for my absence - you can blame Apple

It's been a relatively long time between posts here at The Bank Channel due to 2 major factors:

• The imminent arrival of another person in our current family of 2 means much preparation and time away from the world of banking customer experience. Expect to not hear from me again quite soon.

• I've now got an iPhone. And it's great.

You would think the second point would make me potentially more productive, more across the news, more ready to blog. I'm too busy playing with this new toy to care. Even this post was written on it.

This is for me a substantial leap in hand held devices. Coming from a crackberry pearl, even the new interface of a touchscreen was big enough. But I've since learnt that true customer experience differentiation isn't in the hardware, it's in the software. Apple have truly shown deep thought for the customer here.

Against Forresters 3 customer experience principles - usable, useful, enjoyable - it easily achieves all 3. The phone predicts when you want and let's you control when you want. It's easy to setup, even fun. A good friend saw my new phone and wanted to know how thick the instruction manual was. It was only then I remembered that it didn't come with one. There is nothing to really 'learn' here.

There are a couple of well publicized limitations - no cut and paste at all, some issues with email setup creating 100's of contacts you don't want, and safari is a little flaky. There are some quite obvious improvements to make. But again, this is why software - an updatable and malleable thing - is the key (I hope the hardware stands up to it long term - Apple have for now simply taken it out of the equation).

But I've even questioned the old ways already - despite obvious technical differences, what really is the difference in email vs chat vs SMS? On this phone they all feel the same. Why am I waiting for the PC to fire up when this ready to go? Why isn't everything an app rather than a website?

The irony is I've yet to really test the actual phone call capability (Optus currently have some variable performances in coverage). Like many new smart phones, it's the phone you use the least.

An incredible device, no matter how much you hate the hype.