‘Appalled’ by the iPhone
It’s now been more than a year since the Apple iPhone was launched onto the world stage, to mass acclaim, seven months since it was available to buy in the USA and three months since it’s been out in the UK. Having played with the iPhone first in August last year, I could see the huge leap forwards in terms of user accessibility and the fabulously quick and easy means of syncing and updating, and I genuinely thought that Apple could be onto a big, big success story. But has this happened?
Retail experience is letting Apple down
In the UK at least. Two examples from the last day or so. Firstly my long-time-industry-compatriot Marek Pawlowski was out shopping with his girlfriend, who was after a new phone – read through his excellent post until you get to the iPhone part, by the way – in the O2 shop there weren’t any iPhones on display because somebody had nicked the (tethered) display models and the staff were afraid to put in any replacements!
Next, I happened to be passing Carphone Warehouse and I couldn’t resist popping into the (customer-free) shop. Four iPhones, all working, tethered to the usual bare bones wooden tea chest (what’s that all about?). I started playing…
iPhone pricing musings
It’s been interesting watching the reported sales figures for the Apple iPhone trickle out from the various networks across Europe. In each case, they’ve been healthy without really going as stratospheric as the device itself would seem to warrant. It seems to me that there are some serious price issues at work here that have hampered the iPhone’s progress.
I can think of three common scenarios:
Why I seriously doubt Apple’s technical expertise sometimes…
Let’s get this straight, I respect Apple’s core software team tremendously. OS X and Leopard have some astonishingly smooth features, immaculately programmed. This post isn’t aimed at the guys behind the OS.
But around the core team, there are some idiots. I’ve expressed my frustration with some of the decisions made by the team behind Apple’s web page creation software several times over on All About Symbian. Making it easy for beginners to create web pages is a laudable aim, but implementing it in such a way that the user’s text is simply rendered as a huge image is crazy, inelegant and farcical. What a waste of bandwidth. And how is Google’s robot going to index these pages if there’s no text?