iPhone 4G Pre-Reviews

What's the best way to scoop the review of a much heralded new piece of geek bling? One option is to borrow it from a bloke in a bar, though that brings its own problems. Another is to review it before its even been released, and give it a foul review, as the Torygraph did last week for the Apple iPhone 4G, due to be outed today. Here are their 10 main points:

1) It’s expensive: Buy the top-of-the-range Blackberry or Android handset and you will still pay a lot less than the extortionate prices Apple charge. If the iPhone weren’t made by Apple, networks would have had to start giving it away on £30 a month tariffs years ago.

2) It’s anti-technology: When the iPhone launched it was cutting edge – now as other manufacturers announce, for instance, that you can use their phones as shareable wifi hot spots, Apple says no. Not because of some spurious “user experience” argument, but because of economics. When will they learn that it’s customers – supply and demand – that should dictate feature availability?

3) No Flash: The iPhone, the phone that promised to put the web into everybody’s pockets, can’t even show you most of it, because it can’t handle Flash graphics. Google Android can, in the latest version (OS 2.2), and it’s going to be available free on a lot of budget tariffs.

4) No multitasking: Tried instant messaging on an iPhone? Oh yes, you have to open the app to see if you’ve got a message. Genius. If Apple announces multitasking next it will be an improvement – but there’ll be no apology for the way it’s treated customers in the past, and no guarantee it won’t behave similarly shoddily in the future.

5) Its battery life is terrible: This isn’t a problem unique to Apple, but look at phones by companies such as HTC – multitasking, better cameras, better screens, all draining their batteries far more – and yet the iPhone, with its undemanding technology, still only offers equal performance.

6) Developing apps for it is costing you money: The special version of the BBC iPlayer, of Natwest Phone Banking, of Eon’s meter reader – developing all of these came out of money that could have been channelled away from a self-important minority and towards more generally useful ideas.

7) It comes with offensively bad headphones: Sit next to somebody using the original iPhone or iPod headphones and you can hear everything they can. It’s another example of Apple charging premium prices, but delivering a dressed up, budget product.

8 ) It’s not very well designed: Use the iPhone as a phone and it’s not got great reception, nor is it particularly comfortable to use for long periods. It’s a computer that happens to have a phone bolted on – jack of two trades, but master of neither.

9) It charges for satnav: In an age when Nokia and Google Android provide completely free mapping and satnav facilities, the cheapest way you can turn your overpriced iPhone into a satnav is with a £19.99 app. Bargain.

10) Those iPod docks are holding back better technologies: As every hotel increasingly thinks it should provide iPod docks, the momentum behind this technology is only growing. But if it wasn’t for the iPod and iPhone’s ubiquity, there’d be more wifi radios, more new technologies and a range of different options, competing and driving innovation.

They then committed the ultimate sin in blogging, by moderating the comments to remove all the fanbois arriving with their burning digital pitchforks, so that (allegedly anyway) only those who agree with them saw the the bloggy dawn light. There has been Lots of Harrumphing about this (probably because a lot of people wished they'd thought of it first, I'll warrant) and of cours e- from a fanboi point of view - its all wrong, wrong, wrong.

Or is it? Lets just go through those points:

1) It’s expensive: Buy the top-of-the-range Blackberry or Android handset and you will still pay a lot less than the extortionate prices Apple charge

Leaving aside that no-one knows the exact pricing, overcharging for stuff has always been Apple's schtick - they have charged more for the same (but beautifully branded) stuff for 40 years now, and about 15% of any market love them for it. Next...

2) It’s anti-technology: When the iPhone launched it was cutting edge – now as other manufacturers announce, for instance, that you can use their phones as shareable wifi hot spots, Apple says no.

Well, its 4G, with a new OS, so thats a bit disingenuous never mind disingenerous

3) No Flash: The iPhone, the phone that promised to put the web into everybody’s pockets, can’t even show you most of it, because it can’t handle Flash graphics.

Actually, very few mobiles (as a % of total usage) today can use Flash (but as Benjamin Ellis comments that quite a few of the non-Apple ones coming along will, however). Let's see what Apple does over the next 6 months.

4) No multitasking: Tried instant messaging on an iPhone? Oh yes, you have to open the app to see if you’ve got a message.

Well, in theory that is half the point - a new OS that is multitasking

5) Its battery life is terrible

It's a smartphone. Next..... (OK, OK its not the best battery, but all the powerful smartphones are pretty big battery chewers)

6) Developing apps for it is costing you money: The special version of the BBC iPlayer, of Natwest Phone Banking, of Eon’s meter reader – developing all of these came out of money that could have been channelled away from a self-important minority and towards more generally useful ideas.

Nah, those geeks in garrets and garages actually develop all this stuff in the belief they will be paid in user uptake and subscriptions. Virtually no one makes any money though - in fact its a marvellous system as its all the creators paying to create stuff we largely use for free. Fools.

7) It comes with offensively bad headphones

They all do. But its the offensively bad music they play that really causes the problems. Next....

8 ) It’s not very well designed

'Course not - its an Apple. They deliberately design ugly stuff so that they can sell it at a lower price than anyone else. Not.

9) It charges for satnav: In an age when Nokia and Google Android provide completely free mapping and satnav facilities

It does indeed - les autres are subsidising this in an attempt to lure people away from Apple.

10) Those iPod docks are holding back better technologies

Much like Betamax, Wankel engines and countless other marvellous technologies that were held back by the sheer popularity of existing stuff that basically did what its users wanted.

We are anything but Apple fanbois (just type in "Apple" in the blog search) and tend to cleave somewhat to the view in "Stuff White People Like" that Apple is largely bought by people who need to feel they are creative etc, but I must say if you were doing a Pre-Review based on zero knowledge of the pre-released product you could do a better extrapolation of what Apple is likely to do, and where the pros and cons are.

In short I'd say the Torygraph review scores about 2/10 tops in accuracy, but 8/10 in linkbaiting. Which was the point, after all, I suspect - they don't make their money from flogging 'phones.

Nor, as some wags would suggest, from accurate reporting