Regarding the Apple iPhone, “Steve Jobs has said, repeatedly, that this is the best iPod that Apple has ever made, and it is. It’s also the best phone that anybody has ever made,” Lev Grossman reports for TIME Magazine.
“E-mail and web-browsing are unbelievably great. Ditto the crisp music and video playback. Everybody I called with the iPhone remarked on the crispness and clarity of the audio. For the iPhone, Apple has brought to market a revolutionarily smart, sensitive touchscreen and created an entirely new user interface to match it, all in one go, so seamlessly that my 3-year-old daughter — and I apologize for going to this place, but the fact is striking nonetheless — had no trouble unlocking the iPhone and dialing with it (even though she believed that she was playing a musical instrument),” Grossman reports.
“The user interface is crammed with smart little touches — every moment of user interaction has been quietly stage-managed and orchestrated, with such overwhelming attention to detail that when the history of digital interface design is written, whoever managed this project at Apple will be hailed as a Michelangelo, and the iPhone his or her Sistine Chapel (Steve Jobs can be Pope in this scenario),” Grossman reports.
“The hype for the iPhone has been so relentless — witness the screaming Yahoos outside the Apple store — that to praise the phone feels a bit like you’re falling for a sales pitch. Resist the temptation. This thing is a marvel,” Grossman reports.
Full article here.
Good Jobs, we hope someone’s bolted every window with ledge access across the mobile phone industry!
“”The user interface is crammed with smart little touches — every moment of user interaction has been quietly stage-managed and orchestrated, with such overwhelming attention to detail that when the history of digital interface design is written, whoever managed this project at Apple will be hailed as a Michelangelo, and the iPhone his or her Sistine Chapel”
Even the boldest of Apple fanatics couldn’t have written such words.
Holy crap what a bold statement.
Well, someone had to go the opposite direction of those who lamely attempted to damn with faint praise the iPhone before it was released.
I have to admit that the iPhone has definitely lived up to the considerable hype. I knew I wanted one and that it would probably be a great product, but it has surprised even me with how damn good it is.
Oh look at me, “I’m crammed with smart little touches.” I have a “a revolutionarily smart, sensitive touchscreen and created an entirely new user interface to match.” My name is iPhone and I think I’m so great.
Whatever. My brown Zune kicks iPhone’s ass.
Your potential. Our passion.™
Just a guess but I think Time wants back in Steve’s good graces after they blew the whistle on the iMac some years ago. They were not given an advance review phone like the WSJ, NYT, USA Today, and Newsweek were.
Maybe this review will mend fences for an advance peek on the “next big thing.”
Whatever floats your boat zuney. Just don’t ever get close to me with your stinkin’ little turd!
Ahhhh Zune Tang, that is so cute. Imitation is definitely a form of flattery and you flatter the iPhone.
Congratulations on buying one an iPhone so that you could write that superb eloquent review of the iPhone vs. the Zune. Get any good calls with your Zune?
Our call, your wait.
Nice review by Time and the others, time for the hype to settle into reality. Very nice
WOW, what a review !
and he is right !
I hear that you can use the zune much like a telephone. Empty out the guts (just squeeze it and most of the stuff squirts out) and then attach 2 zunes with a length of string. Best part, no activation!!
i can’t believe that some of u still think Zune Tang means it.
“… when you’re transferring content from your computer to the iPhone, you can’t simply drag and drop tracks into the phone, in that richly satisfying way you did with your iPod. Moving music and video around is a matter of instructing iTunes to ‘sync’ the iPhone with one more playlists. The procedure feels clumsy and imprecise — you can’t just spear a specific little chunk of content, like a canape with a toothpick, and chuck it into the device for later consumption.”
What is he talking about here? Lack of disk mode or something about the way iPhone interacts with iTunes?
@ Zune Tang
Did you meat “licks” instead of kicks? It’s easy to make such a typo.
MW: Yes.
@ Guessing,
Firstly, Apple spends a lot of advertising dollars in TIME Magazine.. Secondly, there are actually quite a few negative comments in this review as well. MDN just chose not to quote the negative comments on this page, read the full article and you will see it’s not all praise. It is fairly balanced with good and bad comments.
Guessing “Just a guess but I think Time wants back in Steve’s good graces after they blew the whistle on the iMac some years ago. They were not given an advance review phone like the WSJ, NYT, USA Today, and Newsweek were.”
You may very well be right. It is interesting that TIME Magazine did not get an advanced copy of the hardware.
I don’t think that they really padded their review that much, pretty much everyone who has had their hands on one is simply blown away by this thing.
Dear Zune Tang,
Another great contribution that reeks of sarcasm. I guess you’re having a great laugh at other’s expense because they just don’t get it.
Are you the same person as Sputnik?
Now I see. Been doing more skimming through these reviews than I thought.
“The bad news is that the iPhone’s iPod leaves out the ability to manually manage the transfer of music and video content. Unlike any previous iPod, the iPhone does not allow an option for manually dragging and dropping content from an iTunes library directly to the iPhone device icon. Instead, the iPhone strictly uses defined library syncing options for collecting and syncing content from your iTunes library to the device.”
What kind of bullshit is that?
The more I read, the more it becomes clear that Apple are doing everything to keep the iPhone as ‘closed’ as possible.
But if this means cripppling Bluetooth then it’s a deal breaker.
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/iphone-obex
It’s really surprising how many people, including myself admittedly, cited the iPhone as an escape from the crippled clutches of Verizon.
Yet we come to find the iPhone is locked down just as much as a Verizon handset, if not more since Verizon loosened up on the Bluetooth front and you can get free mp3 ringtones on their phones.
If I had to guess, I’d say that Apple’s reasoning behind much of this would be for security purposes. The same excuse Verizon used.
re ZUNE TANG: Oh look at me, “I’m crammed with smart little touches.” I have a “a revolutionarily smart, sensitive touchscreen and created an entirely new user interface to match.” My name is iPhone and I think I’m so great.
Whatever. My brown Zune kicks iPhone’s ass.
Your potential. Our passion.™
—-
LOL!
You are one seriously screwed up dude!
The iPhone is the best mobile device ever created and you actaully think your broawn turd of a Zune can compare??
Boy are you sick in the head!
Face it Zune, Microsoft are fscked, they couldnt have created this device in 100 years.
Why?
Because they are only interested in making money and market share, wheras Apple’s driving force is innovation and moving society forward by technology.
In 100 years time when a teleportation capsule is invented quess which company will invent it?
Yep – you guessed right, it will be Apple.
You can now go back to your ancient mobile phone with physical buttons and ‘baby’ software.
What you are seeing here Zune is only the begining – in 5 years time Apple would have sold over 300 million iphones.
And what’s great about it is that Microsoft, Nokia, Sony Erricson or ANY other competitor cannot compete.
I’m really gonna enjoy watching all these ol dinosaurs go extinct over the coming years.
Apple iPhone.
Welcome to the future.
re : @ Zune Tang
Did you meat “licks” instead of kicks? It’s easy to make such a typo.
—-
Especially on an ancient and crappy mobile phone with buttons on it.
😀
those that still reply to Zune Tang are completely ridiculous.
anyway, about the review:
i think the reviewer means, that unlike the iPod, the iPhone is synced with a playlist, u can’t drop music on the iPhone within iTunes.
it’s no big deal (if true, i don’t own an iPhone), just create a playlist for the iPhone.
How long will it be before MS ‘dumps’ its Windows Mobile partners and creates another vertical phone device (ala dumping PlaysForSure for Zune)? I wouldn’t be buying a Windows Mobile phone anytime soon.
There are already reports of MS talking with TV makers in China to produce an aTV competitor. Once this is out, all the Windows Media Centers will be similarly Zuned.
Given the grief that MS employees got for coming to work with iPods, I wonder what will happen when they start showing up to work with a device that actually runs OS X?
Really, folks, Zune Tang brings some of the best humor ever to this site. I look forward to his/her/its comments in every thread. The threads seem empty without Zune Tang chiming in. Keep up the good work Zuney – you make me smile. But not as much as my new iPhone – it’s as slick and sweet as I thought/hoped it would be. Took all of 3 minutes to set up with ATT and another five or so to synch to the Mac. I shut my old Verizon Motorola off for the last time last night. It shall sit dormant. I didn’t even bother deactivating Verizon as my company has some sort of huge multi-phone plan – OK, not huge, but 8 phones. When it expires, we will all be getting iPhones. Most want one now. I got one because I’m the owner of the company – it’s good to be king.
[I think there are now several Zune Tang’s out there, because some of the post are definitely not as funny or clever.]
These days, I use a regular land-line phone much more than a mobile phone. I think the way the iPhone handles managing voicemail “visually,” setting up three-way calling, using the contacts database, and doing other phone tasks (as seen in the demo video) is totally great. I wish AT&T would license the iPhone interface design to make an “at home” phone (the type with a base station and a wireless handset). It wouldn’t need a high-res screen, multi-touch capability, large capacity flash, the iPod features, or the Internet features. Just that stuff that makes the iPhone the best PHONE ever made.
Here’s another reason to go iPhone…
Those little keys on the Blackberry and Palm et al?… ever wonder how healthy all those crevices are for retaining the bacteria and germs on your fingers??
I would remind everyone of the mint bowl at restaurants research which found several thousand traces of urine on them…
Go iPhone – stay clean and healthy!
ZUNE TANG! Great to see you again buddy! It’s been a while since we were blessed with your comic relief (read: empathy for M$).
Keep up the good job. I look forward to reading your deluded messes in upcoming articles.
@ ken1w. AT&T do not own the interface! who do you think has over 200 iphone patents applied for?
Drink some Camel’s Milk, the fart you blow out thereafter should enable you to clear enough memory in your brain to enable you to store useful information there!
I really was expecting an iPhone backlash, but it appears, if we believe all the glowing reviews, that it somehow manages to exceed expectations. Apple, Jobs and (I presume) Jonathan Ives have done it again.
___________________________________
Are so many of you completely uneducated? Or has the scourge of PC (politically correct) thinking permanently withered your tiny brains?
from Dictionary.com:
(also, float your cursor over the word and hit Command-Control-D)
sarcasm
noun
witty language used to convey insults or scorn; “he used sarcasm to upset his opponent”; “irony is wasted on the stupid”; “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own”–Jonathan Swift
if you like Zuney’s little comments, try some more hilarity in a similar vein:
http://demotivators.com/
BTW: Hey ZuneTang, glad to see you back. How was the vacation? You seem rested and sharp as ever. Keep up the good work!
zune tang, you’re a real wanker.
MW – your. For those who would have spelled ‘you’re’, ‘your’.
…When you switch the phone to “airplane mode” (no electronic transmissions, for use on planes) a tasteful little orange airplane slides into the menu bar, then zooms away when you switch out again. (This was so pleasurable that I repeatedly entered airplane mode while using the iPhone, even though I wasn’t actually on an airplane.)
I should hope not! The pilot wouldn’t be amused to hear dit-dit-dididi-dit in flight.
…As soon as my phone realized it belonged to someone with a nonsense-name like Lev, it started correcting typos like “Leb” and “Lec” to match.
I wonder if they put an easter egg for someone named Balmy Boy.
Macaday:
So, you fall for the American obsession, driven by advertising, with germs and all those icky dirty little things that lurk everywhere waiting to leap upon our snow white bodies, sicken and kill us.
What a dirty dirty world we live in!
hahahahaha!
Humans are the most virulent strain of bacteria in existence.
Besides, without bacteria, we’d all be dead.
Yeah, those itsy bitsy keys of Treos suck mostly if you have adult sized fingers that hit 2 or 3 keys simultaneously.
Before iPhone, I’d actually been hoping that Palm would release a Palm TX Treo. Big, rotatable screen, Treo-like phone capabilities, virtual keyboard, etc. etc.. Ironically, the iPhone is it… a 21st century version, on steroids and OS X to boot!
These things are all true.
I would like to comment on the keyboard again – It’s bloody brilliant. The problem I had with chicklet phones was that I tend to use the pad of my finger rather than the tip to type (I often wear acrylic nails) so I would often hit 2 (or 3) keys at once. No problem at all on the iPhone! I could never type this fast (with my errors corrected so well) on a Treo. No contest.
Also, the sound quality of phone calls is outstandig, and I get better signal with it at home than I did with my Moto flip phone on the same carrier.
-c
Wow, I can’t believe all the love for iPhone.
Jobs swings and hits a high drice to center field, WAAY back. Ballmer is at the base of the fence. It’s going going, it’s a ….
Wow, I can’t believe all the love for iPhone.
Jobs swings and hits a high drice to center field, WAAY back. Ballmer is at the base of the fence. It’s going going, it’s a ….
Wow, I can’t believe all the love for iPhone.
Jobs swings and hits a high drice to center field, WAAY back. Ballmer is at the base of the fence. It’s going going, it’s a ….
Wow, I can’t believe all the love for iPhone.
Jobs swings and hits a high drice to center field, WAAY back. Ballmer is at the base of the fence. It’s going going, it’s a ….
my wife got hers last night, and i have to say i am green with envy. i had VERY high expectations and it blew them all away. the keyboard is great and it runs fast and smooth.
…now i have to decide if i want to try and get one for myself or wait and see what the next iPod and laptops are like……
darn choices!
I can’t wait to get one, though I’m going to have to wait until I establish myself again. Mostly, I can’t wait to see the creative apps that are released over time. As iPhone gets more and more functionality, it’s going to get even more fun, more useful, and a more popular platform.
It has buzz now, but I’d bet that like the iPod, it’s going to have some strong legs.
You make a playlist on your iTunes named “iPhone”
You drop content into it like you’re used to.
You sync and it happens.
Don’t get your panties in a bunch.
I am very very impressed
and beyond that it really is a tool that i need
95% of what I do all day is now in my pocket
AWESOME
IPHONE
I’m very very disappointed. It’s getting more and more difficult convincing people that this device is no good.
It is such a hard job being a Microsoft shill in times like these.
What the heck is this thing called Zune anyway???
The best phone ever made — assuming that you can get it to activate. According to the Mercury News over 100,000 people have a $500 paperweight because activation does not work. Adding to this nightmare is that Apple locks out every feature imaginable until the phone is activated. For all the Apple fan boys here it looks like Steve Jobs and company have real egg on their face over this travesty. Steal hundreds of dollars from people knowing that the product does not work and there are no quick fixes.
It will be interesting to see just how big of a black eye Apple will get over this stupid product. But pissing off hundreds of thousands of people and pretending they don’t exist and there are no problems is a good way to start lawsuits. Here is hoping that we have giant class action lawsuits that will cripple Apple and put them out of business. Time to get back to using normal business devices like the Blackberry.
Nice phone!
Look forward to whatever software upgrades/revisions they have planned and how quickly they will come.
I wonder why apple doesn’t simply allow you to tilt the phone horizontally to type in order to allow more horizontal space for the keys in it’s digital keyboard? Pecking on it that way seems to make more sense and should at least be an option.
Heard somewhere that AT&T has exclusive rights for 5 years in the US on THIS particular iPhone…
Mac Realist is either a MS apologist, a bitter fellow that couldn’t afford the iPhone if it were half the price, a shill for a competing carrier or mobile phone company, a good old fahsioned troll, or all of the above.
The shame of it all for him though is that he’ll have no luck reconciling his fabrications with the reality that the iPhone is clearly a hit, people love it, it’s selling like crazy, the FUD campaigns have not worked, and it will have taken over the market within a span of about three years or less.
@ Camel’s Milk Drinker
> AT&T do not own the interface!
No kidding! Obviously, I meant AT&T should license the interface design FROM Apple. Drinking too much of that camel’s milk, are you…?
I just feel sorry for Mac Realist. He is too nearsighted to see what he is missing. I had no problems activating my iPhone and it has been working great since.
Mac Realist is nothing more than a really bad Zune Tang wannabe. Only, Zune Tang is actually entertaining; Mac Realist is just pathetic, and probably believes his own BS, whereas Zune Tang clearly does not believe his. I mean, has he provided any evidence that “100,000 people” have had iPhone activation problems? Of course not. The reality is that for every person who reported having problems on the various Mac forums and blogs, there were at least 12 who had no problems at all, and most of those problems were resolved within a few hours (several hours for the unlucky ones).
Didn’t he post here a couple days ago how Apple was a racist company because there were no people of color in their ads, not realizing that basically ALL of Apple’s iPod ads feature people of color?
His real handle should be “Mac UnRealist”.
Bite me mac realist, I picked up one of the last to be had in a major city. Activation was smooth as silk, all apologies to those that have had problems. Frickin’ awesome, all I’m going to say!
Peace.
Zune Tang’s attempts at wit and humour have grown to be predictable, boring and tiresome. But apparently he amuses himself.
@Mac Realist
Mercury News must have given every employee overtime – and then some – to take calls from and/or reach 100,000 disgruntled iPhone buyers within the last, what, 48 hours?
Well, at least we know for sure that at least 100,000 iPhones were sold. And since many people seem to be happy with their iPhones, sales must have been much more than 100,000.
And let’s not forget all those who say they have lost the use of the only phone they had because of activation problems – throw in another tens of thousands of iPhone buyers, since they could not have been able to contact Mercury News!
Anyway, I look forward to next weekend, by which time Apple would have stunned most FUDers into silence with actual sales figures, although I still expect to see some posts saying: “197.352 hours waiting for activation. Apple sucks, AT&T sucks….”
Zune Tang is to Mac Realist as
Steven Colbert is to Bill O’Reilly
Zune Tang is to Mac Realist as
Steven Colbert is to Bill O’Reilly
Zune Tang is to Mac Realist as
Steven Colbert is to Bill O’Reilly
Zune Tang is to Mac Realist as
Steven Colbert is to Bill O’Reilly
They’re calling Pixars new movie the best yet and it’s getting rave reviews across the board. Great week to be Jobs
wow, cool Artist!
I’ll have to go check it out.
ACK! ACCK ACK! ACK AK ACK AK AAAACK! ACK ACK.
I got home today to find someone had broken into my house and thrown all my chairs! Ballmer must thrown every chair in the state today!
If you live on the east side, keep your head down tomorrow morning, I hear there’s a 64% chance of Hermann-Miller.
-c
MW: ‘believe’
C1, that story has legs.
It needs flash support. Anyone know when this will happen?
I agree. We need Flash. We also need Java. What good is having the real internet without those features?
@ tchnosox
Simple. When Adobe open-sources Flash.
@ TheConfuzed1
Learn more.
Java is not “the real internet”
Flash is proprietary, owned and controlled by a single company.
Apple is doing something very clever with the iPhone, they are forcing open standards. If it’s not an open standard, it won’t work on the iPhone.
Watch, this will send shock-waves across the internet and have a profound effect on web development going forward.
Just wait.
You’ll see.
I love the new iphone because it has cool things that it never has before in its daily life a wireless internet connection modulator
http://www.iphone-converter.org/
I’m wnitirg tihs form my ihpnoe but the chratcaer regicnotion isn’t wroiking. hlep me!
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