Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Overpriced Keyboard-less Phone Review Roundup

I'll be so glad when Apple's overpriced, keyboard-less iPhone is finally released so I can get back to singing the praises of Vista and writing stories about how Linux is dying. In the meantime, here's a roundup of the latest in iPhone-y news, most of it written by people willing to strike a deal with King Steve of Cupertino to get one of these things in their hands early:

The New York Post gets it right:
TENS of thousands of people are expected to line up this Friday for the most hyped gadget of the decade - the iPhone.

Don't be one of them.

Wally-world Mossberg gets it wrong:
"the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer... the iPhone is a whole new experience and a pleasure to use."
David Pogue pulls his head out of Steve Jobs' ass long enough to finally publish the review he's been sitting on for months:
"...the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles."
And Steven Levy of Newsweek should be fired for consorting with the enemy. Whatever happened to journalistic ethics? This guy clearly got paid to write this glowing "review":
" 'Everyone we talk to hates their phones—it’s universal,' Steve Jobs told me on a call to my iPhone a couple of days ago. (The control-freaky Apple CEO was just checking up to see how I was doing.)

"iPhone is a significant leap. It’s a superbly engineered, cleverly designed and imaginatively implemented approach to a problem that no one has cracked to date: merging a phone handset, an Internet navigator and a media player in a package where every component shines, and the features are welcoming rather than foreboding. The iPhone is the rare convergence device where things actually converge."
Of course, none of this means anything until I post my comprehensive 20,000-word review on the Windows Supersite. Obviously.


edit: Corrected a minor spelling error

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You could always publish a fairly generous review in a general publication, since you can't absolutely rely on a general audience and that'd be good for your general credibility. Then you could follow up with a snide and inaccurate review where you expect mostly Microsoft fans to be reading -- say, at the Supersite. I'd suggest you heavily salt the review in the latter case with plenty of comments about how nothing that doesn't work with Exchange, can't run ActiveX, lacks Silverlight support, doesn't edit Office OOXML spreadsheets, and doesn't play WMA and WMV files can't possibly be any good. Suggest anyone who actually likes the device has some kind of quasi-religious mania about Apple. Imply that you'd be even more damning if you dared, but that you don't want your family threatened by foaming-at-the-mouth Apple fanboys.

FakeDvorak said...

What kind of reviews do you expect when they give these Apple Polishers™ a status symbol to show off to all their pals (all 5 of them).

They didn't have to pay Levy a dime. He was in their pocket the moment he could go to work and have a crowd gather around him. This is something he wished for since he was a geek in high school, dreaming of being the star quarterback so that girls might talk to him. Apple made his dream come true. Well, maybe not the part about getting laid, but still close enough. If he had to twist facts and distort the truth, so what, he had to pay them back somehow. It's pathetic.

Anonymous said...

What's the matter, John? Bitter you didn't get a unit in advance and unwilling to actually pay for one? Won't Leo lend you his, or did he already promise to lend it Steve Gibson?

FakeDvorak said...

Apparently Mikey busy eating his Life cereal and doesn't have time to read my brilliant second blog (the one that isn't at dvorak.org/blog) Otherwise he would know that in fact, Leo Is lending me his Friday morning before I go to Germany.

It's at fakedvorak.blogspot.com.

Don't forget to also visit dvorak.org/blog at dvorak.org/blog.

Not Paul said...

anonymous: Apparently you've been reading my work for quite a while.