Letters to the Editor
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"What do you think will suck about the iPhone?"
The service provider.
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The service provider AND
The price. I'd never pay that much for a cell phone (and for me that would be its primary function). Although June 29th IS my birthday, so if Apple wants to give me a birthday present...
Oh, and I doubt it would stand up very well to my all-chewing puppy, who has the damnedest way of getting hold of my more valuable possessions. My Razr has several chew marks on it, but it still works just fine.
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Your headline is leading and who cares what Dvorak thinks.
Dvorak is not a credible source for anything about Apple; he clearly is nursing some kind of grudge and it is an ongoing decades-old campaign to dis the company. Yawn.
Whatever first-generation flaws there will be, and I'm sure that some will be flawed in some way, those flaws will be NOTHING compared to the bug-ware that Microsoft et al put out, not to mention the crap that Nokia, Motorola and LG sell (all phones that I have personally hated).
This is juvenile journalism, it's all gossip and has nothing to do with technology.
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iPhone Launch Problems? Some Usual Issues - and One Big One with Media
We won't know, of course, until we actually use an iPhone over several weeks, but I'd guess the usual issues with cellular technologies will emerge:
-- The screen will be smudged with facial oils, making visibility & clarity an issue
-- The screen will also be smudged with finger oils, same issue
-- The cellular provider will provide the usual dropped, static-ridden, echoing calls
-- Cellular web services will remain slow and prone to dropped connections
All these, mind you, are true of any competitive device. In other words, they are annoyances associated with cellular phones and not with the iPhone itself.
The one big issue that will be iPhone unique will be "reviewers who can't figure out the user interface isn't what they're used to". Trying to make the iPhone into a better Blackberry, better Treo, better Windows Mobile or even heavens forfend a small-but-somehow-better Mac OS X will miss the point of iPhone entirely.
This is a new generation user interface. It will take experience, not a quick hour of playing around, to really begin to understand. But all the reviews will be out within the first few weeks.
For this product to succeed, we must resolutely ignore uninformed and ignorant reviewers and only pay attention to those who demonstrate they actually set their preconceptions aside and dealt with iPhone as it is.
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Something else...
This is just me, but I don't like phones with exposed (uncovered) screens (due to aforementioned puppy chewing and other scratchability). So I always buy flip phones, which have ANOTHER advantage in that they are usually big enough for me to hold them between my shoulder and ear, at least for short periods of time. Don't talk to me about headphones--anyone I've ever talked to using Bluetooth I can only hear about 1 word out of 3, and any regular headphones I can't seem to keep in my ear. Only thing that would work would be a full headset, which wouldn't fit in my purse.
sooo...
Disadvantage: Exposed screen, not a flip phone
I'm sure the iPhone will be very cool, and desperately impractical for me personally.
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Who cares?
I have a phone that works. Why do I want to spend $500 on one that does things I wouldn't want it to do in the first place?
I don't text-message, I don't want my email chasing me around the streets, and I'm sure not interested in watching TV on a palm-sized screen. When I take out my phone, it's to make or take a call.
Is that so bloody difficult for every mobile phone maker to understand?
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The biggest problem will be finding one
For a product that virtually no one has ever seen, a lot of people are spending a lot of effort to try and convince us how it couldn't possibly work as advertised. While no first-generation product will be perfect out of the gate, the biggest problem Apple will have with the iPhone will be keeping them in stock. I won't be on the lines outside the Apple stores at the end of June, but I'll be there by the end of the year, when the crowds have thinned and the software has had a chance to be revised once or twice.
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What sucks about the iPhone?
What sucks most about the iPhone is that I won't be able to afford one right away. I bought a cell phone once and it was the most obnoxious piece of crap I've ever owned. The iPhone is the first that I've seen that could entice me back into the cellular world.
Look, I hear all these people talking the same trash that they said about the iPod several years ago. Boy, they sure had it right on that one. So now we have an iPod that now plays video, takes pictures, runs OS X, makes phone calls, and, as we will probably learn Monday, will be at least partly open to third party developers possibly turning it into a whole new platform.
Yeah, I don't need to actually HOLD ONE IN MY HAND. I already know everything I need to know to offer my expert opinion. The iPhone will fail big time. When it's not busy sucking, it will be blowing. It sucks and blows. It's the suckiest of things that suck.
Oh, and Dvorak? The kid at the party banging on the piano going, "lookitme, lookitme, lookitme!"
Sign me,
So Want One
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Third-parties
The iPhone will start its quick road to oblivion as soon as it opens up its API to third-party developers. As fast as you can say, "Damn, my phone's fucked up," the poorly coded 'Feed Your Dog Reminder' widget that you installed on your iPhone last week will bring your billion-dollar device down to its knees.
Of course, the beauty is that you won't know it's your ill-fated widget that brought you phone down. You'll go to an Apple discussion forum and blast the iPhone for crashing.
Repeat.
Watch it go down in flames.
I think Jobs had something when he said that he is hesitant to allow third-party applications onto the iPhone. And if he does allow it, he should charge each company $10,000 to put it on his iPhone to prevent fly-by-night chop shops (and Russian mafia cartels) from creating crap apps.