“I have confession to make: I couldn’t give a hoot about the iPhone,” Jonathan Weber writes for The Times Online.
“As a technology pundit and entrepreneur, I’m not supposed to say that. On the contrary, I’m supposed to be 1) wowed by Steve Jobs’ brilliance; 2) awed by the iPhone’s cool technology and sleek packaging; 3) eagerly analysing how the device is going to change the world; 4) racing to make my own web business mobile-friendly (read: iPhone-friendly); 5) tut-tutting about Apple’s command-and-control approach the business, just to keep by [sic] critical credentials up; and, of course, 6) rushing out to get one of my own,” Weber writes. “But I don’t care about the iPhone.”
“I currently carry a Blackberry, because my work life is so e-mail-centric that I get anxious when I’m off e-mail for too long at a stretch. And of course it’s now hard to imagine being without a cellphone. Maybe the iPhone would be somewhat better for these things, but it won’t change the fundamentals. Check e-mail and make phone calls. That’s really all I want to do on a mobile device,” Weber writes.
Full article, Think before You Click™, here.
Jonathan Weber’s great-great grandfather, circa 1914:
I have confession to make: I couldn’t give a hoot about the automobile.
As a technology pundit and entrepreneur, I’m not supposed to say that. On the contrary, I’m supposed to be 1) wowed by Henry Ford’s brilliance; 2) awed by the automobile’s cool technology and sleek metal skin; 3) eagerly analysing how the device is going to change the world; 4) racing to make my own wagon wheel business travel-friendly (read: automobile-friendly); 5) tut-tutting about Ford’s command-and-control approach the business, just to keep by [sic] critical credentials up; and, of course, 6) rushing out to get one of my own. But I don’t care about the automobile.
I currently travel by horse, because my work life is so close by that I get anxious when I’m too far away from home for too long at a stretch. And of course it’s now hard to imagine being without a horse. Maybe the automobile would be somewhat better for these things, but it won’t change the fundamentals. Hop aboard and go somewhere. That’s really all I want to do with transportation.
@iPhone user
Don’t feel sorry for me, i’m quite happy for my choice, and with every banned appstore app i feel even better
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No, the point is that E71 becomes an extension of my mbp while i’m at the office. When i move out it has most important things with me on the go – the phone and the messaging. Why iPhone has worse integration with mac than nokia beats me. Apple has everything to do it right, but for some reason they won’t.
Notice, his last name is spelled with *one* b, not two. So it’s not me saying these things.
— Jonathan Webber (jcw3rd)
My work gave me a Blackberry and it sits in my drawer. I spent my own money for an iPhone. You got it… I would rather pay to use an iPhone than receive a free Blackberry.
I think MDN’s take is about right…
The bit that I would fine tune though, is item (4) which I would have worded as follows:
4) racing to make my own buggy-whip business travel-friendly (read: automobile-friendly)
I recommend this change as the wagon wheel business can transition across to the after-market alloy wheel business (ever seen ‘Pimp my Ride’ on MTV?) where as the buggy-whip business is truly as anachronistic as the related animal-based mode of transport underpinning the MDN take.
Having said that, I am sure I have just upset the few remaining buggy-whip business owners who are still out there…
Why get all steamed at Boo? He’s a mac guy. I’m a mac guy, and I have a slightly old moto cell phone – it works perfectly for voice, kind of sucks for voice mail… but useful enough. If his Nokia works for him, so what? I want an iPhone too, but so far can’t really justify the purchase price or the contract obligation. So, it will be on my list of ‘things I eventually will get’ and I go about my business. In the meantime, not everyone needs or wants the same thing. Lighten up! Sheesh.
Sure can tell you aren’t a teenager.
While you can screw your sweetie on horseback, the horse, at a canter, does most of the work, I’d love to see you try it on a bike.
MDN had the right analogy, horse to car not bike to car.
@ Predrag,
“I’d love to see you try it on a bike.”
It CAN be done. Doggy style too! Woohoo!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recumbent_bicycle
I’m guessing he hasn’t used the iPhone yet. That’s usually the case with the knockers.
It seems not every one share the same vision.
I must confess when Steve announced the iPhone I bought a 3G crapberry as I could not wait to change my dying Nokia. And I have admin it works great for emails, basically the bb is the modern pager, to retrieve a jpg from it you need to ask for it. Kind of useless uh? I mean in 3G mode battery sucks, and I never was able to connect to the web due to so called technical reasons.
Now when the iPhone 3G when out, I was there to get 2, one for me and a white for my wife. Yesterday we were lost in the country side with our classic car (not a Model T, one without GPS) and thanks to the iPhone we came back home safely!
In case the so call tech pundit missed the point here, with a perfect web access we carry a mini computer with us all the time and we are ready to face any situation and I am sure you all have thousands of similar examples. Just one thing. Maybe the email lover is receiving HTML emails, he simply should see the difference between a bb and the iPhone, then I am sure he would change his mind. Dumb Ass…
@CEMac: You make some valid points, but some of them represent personal preferences. Toy mapping is a critique only of what the iPhone comes with; it’s not an inherent shortcoming of the phone. Development is going to solve that problem, and soon, just as it did with–the stuff you apparently like–WinCE and other devices. Do I wish turn by turn was already in there? Sure I do. Does that make it “toy mapping”? Apparently, for you it does; not for me. And no matter what is ultimately developed, it will have a hard time competing with my Garmin 770. What’s not toy is the ability to do a search for something, have it show up on the map, including web links for the place, and their phone numbers, etc.
Background SDK is not the same issue as the original SDK; I don’t know anyone who honestly thought we weren’t going to get a real SDK, Steve’s bluster to the contrary, though I was pleasantly surprised by just how good some of the “web apps” were that we did get. There are legitimate battery and performance-relatedf reasons for the “no background process” architectural choice. As I said, either you agree with it or you don’t. The notion, though, that this is a reason to actually prefer Blackberry over iPhone is just ludicrous.
As for battery performance, yes, if you tuirn on and use everything, it drains the battery. Name a phone that doesn’t. I believe it was c|net that tested all the 3G phones, and ranked the iPhone best of an admittedly overall battery-draining lot. Again, this is a reason to prefer the BB over the iPhone? I don’t think so. Hell, when I had my Palm Treo 650, I had to carry a spare battery, and I routinely ran my BB down. Big effin’ deal.
No, I could not give a rat’s a$$ for stereo bluetooth. I spent hundreds of dolalrs on my Etymotic and Westone canalphones. I rip lossless; I care about the quality of the reproduction more than some perceived convenience with battery-sucking, low fidelity wireless headphones. Every $29.95 music phone? Please, restrain yourself. I understand people who want the feature, but your hyperbole is unnecesary. Now, as I said, voice command I do miss. I had that with my Sprint phones, and my Sony and Nokia phones years ago. From a business perspective, and a safety perspective while driving, its absence is amazing.
As to email, I could not disagree with you more. I have used an iPaq, the BB I have, and the iPhone. I will never go back to those other phones. State whatever you want “confidently,” this is just your personal preference. I have used all three systems, and my employer pays for my BB, but not for my Iphone. I would rather use email on my iPhone one-handed than either the BB or WinCE.
As for the ability to edit documents, yes, if you can call WinCE an “operating system,” it lets you edit documents. My god, there isn’t a reviewer alive on the PC or Mac side who has actually suggested that the WinCE system is preferable to an iPhone running OS X. Wait, sorry, that’s hyperbole; I am sure there is someone somewhere. But even PC Magazine chose the iPhone and its OS as an editors choice; when it came to WinCE, PC Mag picked it as an editor’s choice only because it was available on more phones and carriers, not because it was better than the iPhone. Have you actually used WinCE on a touchscreen device? It is pathetic.
But again, much of this is about personal preference. If it was a clearcut as you make it out, I’ll bet you could find some folks who would shell out their own money to own a BB rather than a company-supplied iPhone. Or could you? At my company, I am not alone in paying for my iPhone out of my own pocket. This is just anecdotal stuff, not statistically valid. What is valid is the very real point that until Apple released the first iPhone, the state of innovation from RIM and companies supplying WinCE devices was embarrassing. Even now, the so-called innovation is mostly copycat. Look at RIM’s touchscreen devices (remember their CEO disparaging touchscreen?) and now Verizon has a limited rollout of visual voicemail for a fee. WinCE promises to catch up to the iPhone in about two years.
Could the iPhone be better? Hell, yes, and I look forward to those improvements. But the notion that it is just one of many alternatives, not noteworthy in particular, or unremarkable–which is sort of the point of the original article here–is just laughable. By the measure of almost every pundit other than Mr. Weber, including nearly every Palm/RIM/WinCE apologist, it is a game-changer. More than a year after my first one, I still love using it.
How clever was the choice of pic to illustrate MDN’s take on this story? Did you just pick an old codger at random or do you know who that is?
He’s Lionel Jeffries one of Britain’s best loved character actors (happily still with us), best known to American audiences as Dick Van Dyke’s dad in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
I quote from Screen Online; “……it is as a character actor specialising in doomed obduracy that he will be best remembered”
Obduracy: Stubbornly refusing to change one’s opinion or course of action.
Seems very appropriate.
“But the notion that it is just one of many alternatives, not noteworthy in particular, or unremarkable”
My point is not that, but rather it is good at some things and not at others. So it’s not a knockout punch, just a good option if you’re wanting to do the things it does well.
“What’s not toy is the ability to do a search for something, have it show up on the map, including web links for the place, and their phone numbers, etc.”
That’s just like any Tomtom or Garmin product. I like Google Maps, mostly for planning routes but not as a replacement for a turn by turn navigation software and/or hardware.
“There are legitimate battery and performance-relatedf reasons for the “no background process” architectural choice.”
Well not really, since Unix has run just fine with background processes on hardware much more lightweight than an iPhone, and the core iPhone OS runs multiple background processes. it’s just the SDK doesn’t let you create your own. The problem is there’s a whole class of applications that lack of background processing eliminates. Anyway, Apple will fix that and then those who think it’s an “Architectural Choice” with “Good Reasons” will see that they were just acting as unpaid extensions of the RDF until Apple could figure out how they were going to deliver it in the SDK. Listening to the push server explanation was like stepping back a year and listening to the “you don’t really need an SDK” explanation. You know sooner or later reality will win out over short term spin and Apple will figure out how to do background processes.
“Have you actually used WinCE on a touchscreen device? It is pathetic.”
Yes. I’d agree that what the iPhone does is more easily presented, but that’s largely because it’s feature set is much smaller. So if you’re happy that the smaller feature set does all you need (or just that you can find what you want in your iPhone) score one for the iPhone. If you want your phone to do more, score one for Windows Mobile.
“I believe it was c|net that tested all the 3G phones, and ranked the iPhone best of an admittedly overall battery-draining lot.”
They were mostly looking at talk and standby time, not use as a handheld computer. I’ve never seen a Windows Mobile device battery go down like the iPhone does when using it as a handheld device. As long as the iPhone is asleep in your pocket with Wifi, 3G and GPS turned off, it seems to be OK though.
“I care about the quality of the reproduction more than some perceived convenience with battery-sucking, low fidelity wireless headphones.”
Good for you, I just don’t like the ugly ass external BlueTooth dongle you have to use to make an iPhone (or iPod) talk properly to a BlueTooth enabled set of headphones or a stereo. In the cases where I want to hardwire it, it’s fine and I’ll get better quality. But when I don’t want to do that, Apple should at least support a basic industry standard, and it is no hyperbole, every new $29.95 music phone has the feature.
Many here think the iPhone is the uberphone, that supercedes all other phones and talk through their ass about how bad the alternatives are despite never having used anything but an iPhone. I’ve used the alternatives and the iPhone and iPhone 3G are good first and second shots from Apple. Blackberry excels at corporate email and not much else. It will eventually go the way of Palm OS which excelled at being a 90’s style PDA and not much else. But for now it’s still a significant platform. Windows Mobile is still a more capable and extensible mobile computing platform than the iPhone. The iPhone is easier to use. The iPhone is a strong consumer phone since the feature set is well chosen for that class of customer. Battery life is probably going to be the biggest killer in it establishing itself as some kind of mobile computing platform.
Microsoft’s business model for Windows Mobile for both handset makers and software developers is open and flexible. Apple’s is proprietary and closed.Strangely Apple seems to have learned nothing there from handing the PC market to Microsoft on a platter.
Hopefully Apple’s role in this is not to repeat their PC experience of prodding the world down a new path only to be rolled over the top of by others.
My musing on the iPhone and @CEMac.
The iPhone and its potential –
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
–
@CEMac –
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
MDN MW “value” ’nuff said!
Probably the funniest MDN evah´!
= )
(what is the trouble so many brittons have with Apple ? I´m not one of them and I don´t get it )
…ok so he wasn´t brittish. Hmmm… Not much of a “pundit” anyway
I bet this same fool said the same sorta thing when the Blackberry came out. Like “What do I need any extra features on a phone for? My computer handles all my email, and I my phone is for calls and SMS.”
Who needs convergent technologies, eh? just gimme a phone, a camera, gps, a palmtop, and I’ll stick em all in my pocket.
pfft! Let’s all keep living in 2003.
PS Great take, MDN.
“Who needs convergent technologies, eh? just gimme a phone, a camera, gps, a palmtop, and I’ll stick em all in my pocket.
pfft! Let’s all keep living in 2003.”
The iPhone remains something of a jack of all trades and master of none. If that’s what you want from convergence, that’s fine.
Awesome. And the text too. MDN is at their best when being witty instead of flinging playground insults. Stay away from the fat jokes and potty humor (it only reinforces the anti-MacHead stereotypes) and keep up THIS kind of good work!
MDN is one site of where I go each day to seek out the Truth- that is, to put things in perspective. David Pogue was my first guru, then I began to trust and count on Tera Patricks, founder of Mac 360. Since Tera’s death, it hasn’t been the same over there, and now the two figureheads supposedly running the site are arguing: “to Mac or not to Mac.” They’re so frustrated, burnt, and disappointed with Apple that they’re offering to sell the domain and several other crackpot names they’d thought of during a wet dream. They are saying that Apple is now no different from Microsoft, HP, or Dell. One thing I’m sure of- Tera Patricks is turning over in her grave.
HMCIV:
Did anyone catch in the Times Online (UK) article that this “tech analyst” is in Montana???
WTF!!! (Where’s the Fried Possum)
Actually, they do have some high tech in Montana. I spent a few months there, and Bozeman has a lot of big tech corporations.
Also, anyone who knows Montana knows that fried possum isn’t on the menu. Fried gopher though, now that’s another story!
(In Montana, prarie dogs are called gophers, and they’re literally EVERYWHERE!!! They are a real pest!)