Chronicle technology columnist Dwight Silverman is one of the best in the business, so when he pans the trendy iPhone, it’s time to sit and listen:
I lived with the iPhone for about a month, and as an experiment, I carried both it and my Samsung BlackJack, my own PDA. My goal was to see which device I preferred for which tasks. For example, when I wanted to access the Web online, or check e-mail, which would I reach for first?
I started out using the iPhone more, because using it was an adventure. But by the end of my experiment, I was back to using the BlackJack for most serious tasks.
While the iPhone is indeed a very cool device, and there’s a lot about it to like ó see the aforementioned earlier reviews for a litany of them ó I think its shortcomings are major.
Read Silverman’s entire review, whcih pretty much concludes that the iPhone elevates style over substance. Meanwhile, the WSJ’s Carl Bialik breaks down the initial sales numbers for the iPhone and concludes that the pre-release hype definitely exceeded the actual sale numbers.
I’m not sure of it’s his main complaint or an aside, but it’s at least a problem in his view that iPhone isn’t suited for business types.
That’s not an entirely fair standard to hold the iPhone to. It’s not really marketed to business types or necessarily intended for them. A guy who needs a powerful convergence device is almost certainly better off with a Blackberry or a PPC that works at 3G speed and not an iPhone, but we already knew that before the thing was released.
Silverman also covers its shortcomings as an entertainment device, which seems more fair.