I'm going to wager that the choice of a single button on the iPhone is bad design, esp having experienced both single button and multi-button designs (Android phones).
I've designed apps for iPhone and Android and what ends up happening on iPhone apps is that you have to put additional buttons in your app to compensate for the lack of buttons on the iPhone.
Take the virtually omnipresent back button in iPhone apps. Most applications need a back button. Hence on the iPhone, they draw this button on the top left corner. I much prefer the Android phones' hard back button, not only because it makes single-handed operation possible, but also because sometimes soft back buttons don't cut it - what do you do when you want to switch to the last app or what if your app lost focus to another app because of some unsolicited event and you want to go back? Same for search button.
Now I'm not saying Android got all things right. In fact Android UI, UX is nowhere as pleasant as iPhone's. But, I don't agree that a single button on iPhone was a good decision. I'd like to know if there have been any real-life studies or empirical data on this.
Not every application needs a back button. Virtual interfaces allow the interface to tailor to the need of the application, instead of the other way around.
I agree sometimes a back button seems like it would help, but after using iOS products for a long time (this is on an iPad, I don't miss hardware buttons much.
I've designed apps for iPhone and Android and what ends up happening on iPhone apps is that you have to put additional buttons in your app to compensate for the lack of buttons on the iPhone.
Take the virtually omnipresent back button in iPhone apps. Most applications need a back button. Hence on the iPhone, they draw this button on the top left corner. I much prefer the Android phones' hard back button, not only because it makes single-handed operation possible, but also because sometimes soft back buttons don't cut it - what do you do when you want to switch to the last app or what if your app lost focus to another app because of some unsolicited event and you want to go back? Same for search button.
Now I'm not saying Android got all things right. In fact Android UI, UX is nowhere as pleasant as iPhone's. But, I don't agree that a single button on iPhone was a good decision. I'd like to know if there have been any real-life studies or empirical data on this.