Verizon Deal May Expose iPhone Flaws
By JOE NOCERA
NYT
With this week’s announcement that Verizon Wireless is going to begin selling the iPhone — something its customers have been panting for ever since AT&T got that first, exclusive iPhone contract four years ago — it’s time for me to face the music. Nobody really cares that the iPhone is flawed. After this column, I’m going to stop caring too. I swear it.
Its design is undeniably elegant; both the iPhone and its sister device, the iPad, stand at the pinnacle of modern industrial design. The iPhone offers some 300,000 apps that delight its users. Photographs look gorgeous on an iPhone. “It is the first and best implementation of a highly mobile computer,” said Roger L. Kay, the president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a market intelligence firm.
Yet for all that it offers, the iPhone has always been plagued by serious drawbacks. The “phone” part of the iPhone has never worked very well, dropping calls with annoying regularity. Even when the phone works, the sound quality is often substandard. You would think in an age when fewer people are using landlines this would matter. Apparently not.
Meanwhile, the iPhone’s lack of a raised keyboard makes it next to impossible to do serious e-mailing. And users have to worry constantly about battery life; if they’re not judicious, the iPhone’s battery can be drained by noon.
(More here.)
NYT
With this week’s announcement that Verizon Wireless is going to begin selling the iPhone — something its customers have been panting for ever since AT&T got that first, exclusive iPhone contract four years ago — it’s time for me to face the music. Nobody really cares that the iPhone is flawed. After this column, I’m going to stop caring too. I swear it.
Its design is undeniably elegant; both the iPhone and its sister device, the iPad, stand at the pinnacle of modern industrial design. The iPhone offers some 300,000 apps that delight its users. Photographs look gorgeous on an iPhone. “It is the first and best implementation of a highly mobile computer,” said Roger L. Kay, the president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a market intelligence firm.
Yet for all that it offers, the iPhone has always been plagued by serious drawbacks. The “phone” part of the iPhone has never worked very well, dropping calls with annoying regularity. Even when the phone works, the sound quality is often substandard. You would think in an age when fewer people are using landlines this would matter. Apparently not.
Meanwhile, the iPhone’s lack of a raised keyboard makes it next to impossible to do serious e-mailing. And users have to worry constantly about battery life; if they’re not judicious, the iPhone’s battery can be drained by noon.
(More here.)
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