“To much fanfare, Apple [on Tuesday] introduced the iPhone — its entry into the mobile communicator market. Upon seeing Steve Jobs’ presentation and getting a good look at the iPhone, my first thought was, ‘Wow, that’s pretty darned neat,’ and that’s without actually touching the thing. Not that I needed to; you can assume that anything coming out of Apple is going to be slick — the interface will be close to flawless and you know it’s going to work well,” Andrew Kantor writes for The USA Today.
“There was plenty of hype, and there will be plenty more — look for a glowing review from the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg any day now. I don’t know that there’s ever been an Apple product he didn’t gush over,” Kantor writes. “But I took a step back from that hype. Yes, Apple often makes great stuff — usually, but not always. Will the iPhone be a market-changer like the iPod, or just another cool contender?”
“…The cellphone market is a lot more mature than the music-player market was when the iPod blew it away. There are already phones with cameras, e-mail applications, Web browsers, and music players. What Apple and Apple fanatics are counting on is that Cupertino’s second entry (let’s not discuss the awful Motorola ROKR) will be so much better than what’s out there that people will be willing to overlook any downsides and shell out $500 or $600 to buy one,” Kantor writes.
Kantor writes, “The iPhone is bound to have an incredible interface; it wouldn’t be an Apple product if it wasn’t designed from the ground up to be easy, fun, and intuitive to use. But that interface is going to have to be a step or two above incredible because the functionality of the iPhone — and more — is already available on other products… “amazing” might not be good enough this time.”
“First of all, to use the iPhone you need to use Apple’s iTunes software, and with it Apple’s FairPlay (ha!) digital rights management scheme. It means dealing with a product that — despite what Mac fanatics say — is fraught with problems,” Kantor writes.
Kantor writes, “At this point it isn’t clear whether anyone but Apple will be allowed to create applications for the iPhone, although it does run OSX. At the start, though, it will only do what Apple allows it to. As with all things Apple, it’s their way or the highway, and right now that doesn’t include supporting Word or Excel files, so business users may want to look elsewhere.”
Kantor writes, “While Cingular might be the largest mobile phone company in the country, it may not be the best… Cingular does have a high-speed data network called BroadbandConnect in about 60 major metropolitan areas. Unfortunately, the iPhone doesn’t support it. That’s right: The iPhone doesn’t do 3G data rates. (Apple is said to be working on a 3G iPhone, but that will be small consolation to people who shell out for version 1.0.)”
“The bottom line for at least this first generation iPhone is that it’s a wonderful interface with great looks wrapped around an average product. Certainly not the high-end equipment you would expect for the price,” Kantor writes.
Full article here.
Only a scribe of Kantor’s caliber, writing for a publication with the stature of USA Today, is able to divine so much about a prototype device such as Apple’s iPhone without even touching it. It’s a truly remarkable talent for which one would assume Kantor is paid an unimaginable sum.
That Kantor can divorce himself from the type of journalists such as The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg is an stunning feat.
It takes a man like Andrew Kantor to concisely explain why Apple’s iPhone is nothing special, since other cell phones on the market already have cameras, email apps, Web browsers, and music players – regardless of the robustness of such features. To ignore that iPhone’s music player is an iPod and what that implies or that iPhone’s Web browser, email client, etc. are full-featured desktop class applications is a surprising talent. To report that Motorola’s ROKR phone was an Apple product is a scoop that only a man like Kantor can break in the pages of an outlet such as USA Today.
In not being wowed by online videos of the Apple iPhone’s user interface, Kantor amazes. Kantor’s ability to tell if a device’s user interface “might not be good enough,” again “without actually touching the thing,” is certainly a special gift granted only to a rare breed.
Who else besides Kantor can report that Apple’s iTunes software is “fraught with problems” without even needing a single example or providing any proof? Only a man with the level of trust that Kantor has earned over the years, of course.
Think about this: Kantor is able to sit in Virginia in January and predict across continent and time exactly which types of files Apple’s iPhone will support in June; even without the iPhone’s software being completed! Only Kantor could, with aplomb, advise that business users may want to look elsewhere. He continually astonishes.
By describing Apple’s iPhone as a device with a “wonderful interface with great looks wrapped around an average product” that’s “certainly not the high-end equipment you would expect for the price,” Andrew Kantor deserves some kind of award. He certainly is special.
Andy loves to hear how special he really is, so tell him: andrew@kantor.com
[UPDATE: 4:47pm ET: Mr. Kantor has responded via his blog: Kantor: ‘Mac fans are nothing if not predictable’ – January 12, 2007]
Related Kantor articles:
Kantor: ‘Mac fans are nothing if not predictable’ – January 12, 2007
USA Today tech writer: Apple’s Boot Camp will get Mac users to switch to Windows – April 14, 2006
USA Today columnist calls Mac users and Apple fans a ‘cult of blind little lemmings’ – September 16, 2005
USA Today: Apple’s iPod nano ‘a beautiful piece of hardware’ – but ‘the competition has caught up’ – September 16, 2005
USA Today writer: Apple’s iTunes Music Store’s ‘restrictive license’ fosters rampant piracy – March 25, 2005
USA Today writer unhappy with MacDailyNews and some Mac users’ emails – October 18, 2004
USA Today writer attempts to downplay Apple’s role in Virginia Tech supercomputer – September 03, 2004
Related iPhone articles:
Cringely: Apple iPhone will suddenly go 3G, gain features, and be renamed ‘Apple Phone’ – January 12, 2007
Apple’s Phil Schiller gives CBS News hands-on tour of iPhone – January 12, 2007
20 unanswered questions about Apple’s iPhone – January 11, 2007
Report: iPhone could be upgraded to 3G with software update if Apple wishes – January 11, 2007
Report: Rogers Communications to offer Apple iPhone in Canada – January 11, 2007
David Pogue: hands on preview of Apple’s iPhone, ‘gorgeous and so packed with possibilities’ – January 11, 2007
PC Magazine hands-on test of Apple iPhone: multi-touch UI ‘takes the breath away’ – January 11, 2007
Mossberg’s initial take on Apple iPhone: ‘radical and gorgeous’ with ‘brilliant new user interface’ – January 11, 2007
NewsWeek’s Levy interviews Apple CEO Steve Jobs about iPhone – January 11, 2007
Why Apple’s iPhone doesn’t do high-speed mobile phone networks (yet) – January 11, 2007
RealMoney: Apple just blew up the whole damn mobile-phone supply chain with its new iPhone – January 11, 2007
ZDNet: Hands on with Apple’s iPhone: ‘elegant, ravishing, simple, sleek; impeccable & intuitive UI’ – January 11, 2007
Apple iPhone FUD campaign begins – January 10, 2007
Nine ways Apple changed the face of consumer electronics yesterday – January 10, 2007
Analysts and investors applaud arrival of Apple iPhone – January 10, 2007
Top 10 things to love and top 10 things to hate about the Apple iPhone – January 10, 2007
How Apple kept the iPhone top secret for 30 months – January 10, 2007
Hands-on with Apple’s iPhone – January 10, 2007
The only thing really wrong with Apple’s iPhone is its name – January 09, 2007
Is Apple building ‘The Device?’ [revisited] – January 09, 2007
Analyst Bajarin: Apple’s iPhone and Apple TV are industry game changers – January 09, 2007
Time: ‘iPhone could crush cell phone market pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority’ – January 09, 2007
Analyst: Apple iPhone should be given its own category – ‘brilliantphone’ – January 09, 2007
Cingular to use Synchronoss Technologies’ platform for Apple iPhone – January 09, 2007
iPhone photos from Apple’s Macworld Expo booth – January 09, 2007
Enderle: Apple’s iPhone is going to do very well – January 09, 2007
Apple debuts iPhone: touchscreen mobile phone + widescreen iPod + Internet communicator – January 09, 2007
FUD Alert: Analyst – I am pretty skeptical Apple’s iPhone can succeed – January 11, 2007
The Register’s Ray: Apple ‘iPhone’ will fail – December 26, 2006
Analyst: Apple iPhone economics aren’t that compelling – December 08, 2006
CNET editor Kanellos: ‘Apple iPhone will largely fail’ – December 07, 2006
Palm CEO laughs off Apple ‘iPhone’ threat – November 20, 2006
Love it.
Want it.
Gimme
Pleeze.
Soon.
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This writer is retarded mainly because of this line…
“because the functionality of the iPhone — and more — is already available on other products”
Clearly he doesn’t understand. He did not do his homework or as I suspect, is a complete blithering idiot. For everyone out there with a smartphone, these apps suck the big one! They are… as Steve called them, baby apps. I call them crippled apps. Barely functioning apps.
To anyone with more than one brain cell tthat is busy keeping his or her heart beating, the iPhone apps are complete apps. This makes it a brilliant phone, not a smart phone.
Mossberg: But but …Apple’s car has round wheels.
Kantor: So? All the other cars have wheels too, albeit square ones.
Didn’t I just read something here yesterday about how the iPhone might have the ability to read Word docs on release? Basically, how can anyone make any solid assessments of the iPhone if it isn’t even a real product yet? Everybody just needs to back away from the iPhone. Slowly.
Yes, Mr. Kantor, my ’68 Beetle has a steering wheel, an engine and a radio. Hell, it even has windshield wipers! No need for the 2007 Bentley Drophead Coupe! VW’s been doing the same thing for 39 years!
Also, I’ve never found a Word or Excel file that I wanted to look at on my WM5 Motorola “Q”. It’s just not needed.
PlaysForSure (ha!)
This guy shouldn’t even be writing for the free paper at the grocery store.
Apple did some revolutionary things with the product itself, but it makes sense to be conservative with its introduction, to ensure wide adoption. This will be a 1.0 version, duh!
Start small and build, like they did with the iPod, and, gee, look where that is now!
Truthbearer has turned his speculations on a product that hasn’t shipped into “truthiness”
“crap battery life (5 hours ideal in a lab = 1/2 that in reality – so you’ll be saddled with chargers”
Again not based on fact, just speculation, btw, I recharge my RAZR ever night, so big deal.
“No Java/XML capabilities – so webpages will be crippled”
And just how do you know this? Safari supports Java and XML.
“8 Gigs – so you can’t truly substitute your iPod with it so it isn’t a true “convergence” device.”
My 1Gig Shuffle holds enough songs for me, 2000 songs aren’t enough for you? Oh yeah right unless it hold 23 Gigs of music it not an iPod to you. What a wanker!
“Another scratcheable screen”
You know this based on…? Obviously not first hand experience!
Kantor displays breathtaking stupidity by pointing out that beneath the interface all the other bits are the same as any other high-end phone.
What he simply cannot see is that the interface it what it’s all about. One of the biggest criticisms of current phones is that the interface is clumsy. Apple needn’t have worked for 2 1/2 years if any old interface would suffice, they could have simply bought the bits and glued them together, just like the others do.
But there again, Kantor wouldn’t understand things like that as his style of writing shows that thinking carefully about what you do isn’t part of his style.
We can rely on Kantor to always knock Apple products, fortunately the thousands of other reports around the world in the last few days provide a completely different point of view to his.
As usual, MDN’s take has a Zune-like level of self-awareness.
Without having actually touched the thing, MDN is calling out anyone who doesn’t have an immediate, uncontrolled erection over it.
MDN, with no sense of irony or restraint, ridicules every other manufacturer’s marketing. But if someone isn’t ecstatically speaking in tongues over an Apple marketing dog-and-pony show, they are guilty of FUD.
It’s OK to really like Apple products. But condemning others for FUD while employing FUD daily is nothing but self-deluded hypocrisy.
The new acronym is HIF: Hysterically-Illogical-Fanboy. MDN is the ultimate personification of HIF.
Hey! The Truthbearer post I was responding to has disappeared! Has MDN banned him?
Very interesting!
@ Informed
Agreed. HIF… I like it.
How come no one is calling this Newton 2.0? ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />
Oh and as an expert with 10 years cell experience selling these devices, upgrading to 3G will NOT be handled with a software upgrade unless there is the chip to handle it already in the device, most likely for HSDPA.
I am quite convinced that Apple will never, ever leave the computer market. In fact I am thrilled that they are becoming a more consumer oriented company because that is where Apple’s strength lies. It’s nice to have things like iPhones and iPods begin to subsidize Macintosh development. Yes they did not really cover the Mac so much at Macworld. But if you watched it, you would know that Steve Jobs said that there will be announcements over the next few months regarding Macs. I really don’t think that he wanted to be pressed about what will probably be simple upgrades of the entire Macintosh line. Sure they are going to shove Intel’s latest and greatest in all of their computers, but do you really think he wanted to dilute the message of the iPhone on that day?
“First of all, to use the iPhone you need to use Apple’s iTunes software, and with it Apple’s FairPlay (ha!) digital rights management scheme. It means dealing with a product that — despite what Mac fanatics say — is fraught with problems,”
This is a bizarre passage. FairPlay, needless to say, only applies to iTunes Store purchased tracks. It does not originate from the software. It is true that iTunes software can play FairPlay tracks, by the implication that iTunes originates the DRM scheme is strange at best, misleading at worst. Which product is fraught with problems? The software? FairPlay? The store? The iPod? What are those problems?
Which is tied to the other odd rant Kantor has, re: Apple in the cell phone market. First, he uses the argument other have used and compares how it to the iPod in terms of its ability to change the market. While I do think there is potential for change in the relationship between hardware makers and carriers, there is no expectation that iPhone will have the market share the iPod does. Apple has put out an ambitious number – 1%. While that is huge volume, I do not believe anyone has argued that iPhone can change the market in the same way the iPod did – I have only read arguments against it. Second, he references the ROKR. Uh, dude, Apple didn’t do the hardware – they just did the iTunes integration. I do not believe you can call that an Apple entry into the cell phone market.
In some ways he is right – iPhone is not a huge leap forward in cell phones or iPods or internet devices. However, the discounting of the interface is shortsighted and is the kind of pwned by the box thinking that has given us the crap cellphones (by and large) we have today. It is quite possible that being an ordinary device with a great interface is actually head and shoulders above the competition.
Truthbearer: I agree with a some of your points, but a couple are not convincing in any way.
– Locked contracts: retarded point. You expected Apple to convince a carrier to change its entire profit scheme? Stupid. Oh, yeah, but that is counter to “think different”! Another retarded argument.
– Screen: This is obviously an extrapolation from the Nano and is just speculation on your part. One would expect that for a device the depends on physical interaction with the screen that Apple would have done quite a bit of work in this area. This is like the analyst that criticized the iMac because it looked like it would tip over too easily.
From a simple consumer point of view. I live in Sacramento. Cingular/AT&T is just deplorable in this area. As much as I worship Apple. The iPhone is not an option. After all. Twice I have paid that $200 to flee from both providers!
In gods name, why only Cingular! Apple is a quality product. Cingular is a substandard provider with nasty customer service. I am unable to reconcile the two. Good & Evil.
I can only dream that someday, iPhone will be made available to Sprint or Verizon for that matter.
I absolutely loved that MDN take. Nice one, MDN. But to comment on the article. This is the kind of dribble that will be regurgitated by uneducated, uninspired and ignorant individuals who take the words of unintelligent so-called writers as gospel. I am not even surprised that the editor didn’t even question why this guy even wrote such a piece without any kind of verification. Apple should buy the USA Today and then shut it down. I wonder what he would have to say about that?
I can think of no other phone that allows you to visually select what voicemails to listen to in any order. That is a great feature!
It must be all of the those Dell and HP ads that USA Today has that is really doing the talking here.
It’s like looking at OS X leopard and saying it’s nothing special, because there already exists operating systems such as <insert your favorite crappy operating system>
Ironic that Kantor would criticize Mossberg for always being of one opinion on Apple products.
In defense of MDN:
THis is a mac fan site.. and their editorial slant will (and rightfully so) be pro-mac. There are 3 things that I notice about these kinds of articles that kind of bug me:
1) THey say “this model does not yet have feature x or y, therefore dont buy it.” When in reality we can’t be sure what the final feature set will be. The correct journalistic approach would be to say “the iPhone prototype announced today does not seem to have the ability to open Word and Excel files. Business users who consider this an important feature should check again in June to see if this feature has been added.” Walt Mossberg said as much when he said “it’s way too early to write a review of the phone…”
2) The iPhone is not compared against another smart phone.. it’s usually compared to ALL smart phones. They will say something like “All the features on the iPhone are already available in current smart phones.” But that is totally meaningless. I am not going to go out and buy 5 smartphones that collectively have all the functionality of an iPhone. I would like to see how it stacks up to something I could realistically buy as an alternative.
3) People love to compare specs. They mentally make those tables where you have features on the left hand side and phones on the column headers, and they go through and check features off. Apple products are notoriously hard to compare this way because the numbers do not tell you what it is like to USE the device. The original iPod is a great example. On paper it did not seem so impressive. 5 gb hard drive? THe archos had 20GB hard drives at the time, and I think the Archos also had a radio tuner! Obviously the archos was the better product. But wait.. the archos was HUGE and heavy. It didn’t fit easily in your pocket. It only had USB 1.1 so it took hours to load songs into it. It didn’t have a way to easily sync htose songs, so the process of loading it was really tiresome. How do you fit that kind of thing into a spec sheet? Does the fact that it has 20GB outweigh the fact that it can’t fit in your pocket?
WHen I was watching the demo, I kept thinking to myself.. why the hell hasn’t anyone ever thought of this before? In reality , sure people of thought of, and implemented the various pieces of an iPhone.. but why has no one ever put them together in a package that people can actually use and love yet?
I will give him the stupid ingnorant award.
Congrats Kantor! ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
People lack vision. iPhone as part of an ecosystem changes the way people handle their data and lives. It’s a 1.0 version, but like most Apple 1.0’s, it’s setting the stage for this to become mainstream. In time, we will expect and have basically everything at our finger-tips. Literally. When this happens, there is going to be cultural acceleration of an unprecedented scale.
Hold on to your panties kids, it’s gonna’ be a fun ride.
Good thing that the demographic of USA Today readers (unemployed with 1st grade reading level) probably won’t be buying a $600 consumer electronics gadget.
Wow.
Mac, not a Mac
Cingular sux/is wonderful.
There is a plan here. Enjoy it unfold like it were “24” or “Lost”.
I have used 5 carriers in my 4 state area in the last ten years.
CenturyTel
A,T&T
Alltel
Cingular
And now, the “new” AT&T.
They all suck about the same in coverage. Some good places, some bad.
A friend of mine uses Sprint. Very limited area around here. (don’t get off the big roads)
Cingular has offered the most in unlocked features of any carrier.
They use a world standard-GSM
They agreed to up their system for the iPhone. They will also be completely 3G before too long.
I consider this phone an extension of the Mac platform, not of the iPod.
Now, think about this. Everthing that we are all waiting to see-Leopard, smaller laptops, bigger AND smaller towers, everything that Apple announces from last Tuesday until June will be covered with much more interest by the media, and people waiting to get an iPhone will also pay more atention to what comes out.
Apple led off with their best hitter-a home run. Now every batter to the plate will be watched by all.
I’m all for MDN pointing out poorly written articles. I just wish they would do that for all poorly written articles, not just the ones that say something negative about Apple.
I would place MDN’s credibility just a bit below Kantor’s. At least Kantor tries to pretend to be fair. MDN doesn’t even try.
If you just want Apple news go to http://www.macsurfer.com/ if you want the news with some attitude come here. Quit your bitchn’ about the MDN takes, they’re what make things interesting, along with reader’s posts.
Steve Jobs never said “the phone isn’t finished,” and well be slapping on more features before it’s released… So why MDN, do you assume such?
Steve Jobs DID say “That this is just the beginning.” I am under the impression that this refers to future revisions not the 1.0 iPhone. Apple may still be finising the software for glitches and such, but for the most part, iPhone is done.