"Apple's and AT&T's high-price gadget is a heartbreaking triumph of greed over genius"
He adds that
"The unhappy fact is that for all the glamorous marketing and positioning, iPhone turns out to be the worst $1,975 investment (iPhone plus two years minimum, mandatory service) you could make in mobile communications."
A few more quotes from his review(I added highlighting):
-"Apple and AT&T created the world's first nonprogrammable $500 mobile handset: No Java, Flash or native applications can run on iPhone. That means that the innumerable features found in other $500 smartphones, PDAs, and Pocket PCs are absent in iPhone. Those include: voice dialing; Bluetooth stereo-headset support; VoIP over Wi-Fi; instant messaging (Web alternatives exist, but they don't signal you on incoming messages); audio recording; standards-based tethered and over-the-air sync; remote lock-down and management; Bluetooth file transfer; movie recording; rich document editing; offline document and Web content access; mail viewing with HTML images and JavaScript disabled; mail rules; MP3 ring tones; video and audio codec support beyond QuickTime media types; access to non-HTTP TCP/IP ports and protocols; and so much more that won't be added until Apple decides to do it."
-"Safari will not store or open local HTML, XML, or script files, and in fact, iPhone allows users no access to its storage at all."
-"iPhone is barely passable as a phone, with an extremely weak speaker, comparatively poor signal clarity, and radio frequency interference so powerful that when I tried to attach an iPod voice recorder, iPhone would not support it but still suggested that I shut down the wireless features (activate Airplane mode) to reduce interference. I can't overstate the interference issue. I'm wearing a pair of noise-reducing headphones, and whenever iPhone polls for e-mail or checks in with the cell tower, I pick up the buzzing and chirping familiar to BlackBerry users who set their devices down too close to the bedside radio. But iPhone's interference can be heard through a tuned-in FM radio from a fair distance away. It is loud. Steve Jobs attributed iPhone's delay to market to FCC testing. I can understand why."
-"Phone lacks voice dialing or commands, so you can't use the phone truly hands-free."
-"iPhone is a mediocre phone. Its speaker is too quiet for speakerphone use, and the audio quality of the headset is inferior to that of BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices I have for contrast tests."
-'The upshot is that iPhone is a really sweet mobile device. If you could buy it without AT&T's service, I'd tell everyone to do so: Its flaws are perfectly tolerable if you acquire it as someone who's looking for a wide-screen iPod with Wi-Fi interface. However, since it is impossible to buy without $60 monthly payments, its quality as a phone and mobile browser is overstated, and it is a platform closed to third-party development, I can't recommend it."
Steve Jobs has finally overreached...the iPhone will sell to Apple fans and status freaks, but I think that the iPhone will gain little market share for business users. However, this should be no surprise to anyone who has followed Apple's business over the years. Apple products are never designed for practical business use; Apple's target market is the fans and status freaks that I mentioned before. Apple is always about products that look funky but cost more and provide less functionality that similar products by other companies.
If a company combined Apple's graphic design with Intel/Microsoft pricing for electronics products, they would grab market share in a hurry.
Update: Ephraim Schwartz, also of Infoworld, pans the iPhone as well: "iPhone: Fool me once, fool me twice...The drunken night with iPhone is over, and now as we wake up next to our new love, the sober reality is not as good looking as we thought...Seriously, as an enterprise solution the iPhone appears to be a non-starter. Certainly, other than a C-level executive, there are not many companies that will outfit a large sales force with such an expensive, and more importantly impractical device"...
Update: Mario Apicella, also of Infoworld, has problems with the iPhone as well...
"What stops me from buying one is that it lacks one vital feature in its remarkable bag of tricks: an Internet connection faster than EDGE (Enhanced Data GSM Environment)... the iPhone can connect via Wi-Fi to a wireless network at home, in the office, or wherever you can find one. But that's not enough. When you travel, a faster connection such as HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) or EvDO (evolution, data optimized) is a must-have. These days, EDGE no longer cuts it...As a Cingular -- pardon me, "new AT&T" customer, I know all too well the difficulties of getting on the Internet via EDGE. Downloading multimedia files on the EDGE network is like sucking honey with a straw, only without the sweetness. Uploading files is even worse, much like using dial-up"...
