One: NPR : iPhone Review: Flawed, But Absolutely Beautiful http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11421853&ps=bb1&sc=
And the response to it, from someone who is looking for a new phone right now: that summary is consistent with what I have heard about it. It does indeed look extremely slick, with a brilliant interface and a great screen, but that's not enough to get me to pay $500, wait in line, and then have to manage all the media content on the phone through iTunes instead of as a mass storage device, like our 2+ year old Motorola phones have been able to do just fine all along. We're also not quite ready to pay the $5-$20 extra per month for the expanded data capabilities that one would need to actually take advantage of the thing. I'm also turned off by the fact that part of Apple's strategy for driving the hype has been to give only very limited exposure to it until this week so no one can actually do a real review of it, which might expose its weaknesses. That to me is the ultimate sucker tactic for driving sales up based on the hype alone, and to order a cell phone for $500 based on hype and limited, highly controlled information... well, you see where I'm going with this. I'm reminded by a certain breed of computer geek that I became acquainted with in high school... brain-washed Apple fans who I went to Waynflete with, to whom everything that Apple did was "insanely great" even the one-button mouse. It appears to me that they have successfully bred an entirely new generation of such fans, this time based as much on the iPod as on their computer stuff. So tomorrow, starting at 6pm CST (5pm mountain, 4pm PST, and so on, so they can have them released in Hawaii at the same time as they are released in New York), people who will have submitted their orders months ago, and lined up at Apple and AT&T/Cingular stores hours before, will by the end of the evening receive their iPhones. They then won't be able to use them until they get home and connect them to iTunes running on their computer, through which they register the phone with Apple and put it through some sort of initialization process. Amdocs management is in awe of the success and hype of the iPhone: how could something so expensive, with so little practical information about it released, that won't even work out of the box sell out so far in advance revolutionize the market like this? We had a division-wide meeting about it yesterday. Market saturation of cell phones in North America was beginning to happen. Last year was the first decline in sales of cell phones ever, and this year has seen an increase due mainly to the revolution of video streaming on cell phones, but AT&T has seen the biggest increase for one reason: the iPhone. And, of AT&T's new iPhone customers, more than half are ditching other carriers and moving to AT&T just so they can have one. So, whether the instrument itself is will actually live up to the hype is irrelevant -- it's already revolutionized the industry, before it's even been released. Now here's a prediction: the iPhone will not be seen as perfect, by Saturday there will be a minority of less-than- thrilled new iPhone owners who will form an anti-[iPhone, Apple, AT&T] culture. Why AT&T? Because these days when you get a phone from a wireless provider they will have disabled a number of the features that they don't consider to be to their advantage for users to use even though the capability was built into the hardware, or they will hold such features "hostage" unless the user pays for a more expensive plan that offers it. One example is WiFi, which the iPhone is capable of. Other phones which are sold by Cingular and T-Mobile that are WiFi-capable often have that feature disabled by default by the Cingular or T-Mobile firmware so the user cannot go to a Starbucks and use the free WiFi to browse the internet on their phone unless they pay the cell phone provider a $10/month "ransom". But, I digress. A mob or two of angry users -- that's my prediction. Deepa.
