iPhone reviews out ahead of July 11 date
By Erna Mahyuni
The first iPhone reviews are out and already the blogosphere is buzzing about what USA Today, Wall Street Journal and the New York Times think of the ‘Jesus Phone’.
WSJ’s Walter Mossberg weighed in on the iPhone dubbing it ‘Newer, Faster, Cheaper’. He’s got a nice comparison of the 1st-gen iPhone, the current one and the iPod Touch. Similar all, but not the same as he summarises each device’s key feature. But Mossberg’s angle is the hidden costs of obtaining Apple’s latest shiny gizmo.
He’s talking about the data rates, of course. When you add up the money you’ll be paying each month to own and use the iPhone, AT&T’s charging more for data and texts. Are you, the consumer, willing to put up with those costs? Mossberg also finds the battery life of the new iPhone lacking, his tests finding the new model running out of juice faster than its predecessor. His advice? By it if you’ve been waiting for the iPhone to be cheaper, can deal with the service costs or found the previous one’s speeds lacking. Otherwise, wait for the free software upgrade before deciding.
USA Today’s Edward C. Baig is enthused – calling it ‘worth the wait’. Overall, he thinks it’s a business-friendly device and gives it a near perfect score of 3 and 3/4 stars out of 4, highlighting ‘cool’ features like the accelerometer letting you switch from an ordinary to a scientific calculator by just flipping the iPhone over. Though obviously won over, Baig does point out shortcomings he hopes are fixed by third-party developers. One of them is the absence of audible turn-by-turn directions on the phone’s GPS. Another is the lack of support for Bluetooth stereo.
Too bad for Baig but New York Times’s David Pogue finds the iPhone’s GPS rather limited. He’s queried Apple and found that the GPS antenna is too small to emulate turn-by-turn navigation the way a vehicle GPS unit would.
Pogue says that the the ‘really big deal’ is the software and App Store, not so much the phone itself. On the phone, he comments: “…it’s not so much better that it turns all those original iPhones into has-beens.”
Won over, not quite won over and not all that excited – quite the mixed bag of reviews. But is that going to change the mind of the Apple fanboys come July 11? Not likely.
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