Chris Adams

For years the tech press has denigrated Apple users as being shallow flash-seekers. This is an amusing bit of projection given the key role they play in the hype-cycle, selling shiny-but-useless crap to anyone unfortunate enough to trust them. It's getting a bit annoying watching yet another repetition of the "iPhone killer" article which completely misses why the iPhone was successful. Here's Gizmodo breathlessly hyping the Samsung Instinct (“At Last, a Decent iPhone Competitor”):

Samsung's Instinct may be the best stab at the coveted title of iPhone killah this CTIA. The 3.1-inch touchscreen phone has localized haptic feedback, plus three hard navigation keys. … The Instinct rocks EV-DO Rev A and GPS, in both cases besting what's in the fruit phone. And then content and app wise, Sprint's own wares are basically swapped in for Apple's. … On top of that, its customizable homescreen is amazing

Here's Gizmodo on the Instinct today pointing out that this is the kind of flash-without-substance everyone likes to accuse Apple of selling:

The iPhone-challenging visual voicemail, for instance, ain't quite live. Plus, it locked up when I was messing around with the music store, and needed a hard reset for the more money shot voice command features, which still didn't quite work (or finding a McDonald's is just too much). And the web browser doesn't, um, touch mobile Safari, at least not in its present state.

The thing which almost always gets ignored by tech writers is that iPhone has never been popular with people like the Gizmodo writers because it basically has one new feature (the multitouch interface); it otherwise ignominiously loses a feature–matrix comparison: no 3g, small screen, poor battery life, restricted bluetooth, no MMS, no third-party apps, no flash cards, etc. Everything on the feature list has been done for years by cheaper, less restricted competitors. Logically, this means that the iPhone sucks and the people buying it are brain-washed fashionistas, right?

The catch, of course, is that feature matrixes only matter to marketing people and tech journalists who want to become marketing people. Everyone else tends to care more about how well a few basic features actually work - and that's where the iPhone shines, just as with the similarly disparaged iPod before it:

I've been cell-phone only since 1999 or so and I've used a fair number of phones during that period. The iPhone is the first phone I've had which can honestly claim to have a usable web browser. It's also the first one other than the Palm devices to have an address book or calendar which are usable with more than a dozen entries. It's the first one which lets me dial my fiancé with less than a dozen clicks. It's the first phone I haven't needed to reset because it locked up or got unusably slow.

Note how 3G didn't enter into the picture? It's not really necessary, any more than broadband was a prerequisite for the Internet to enter mainstream life. The trick was that Apple actually paid attention to usability and wrote software which does things like transferring email in the background so you don't have to wait - an advanced 1980s technique which could save Motorola if they copy it quickly (the SLVR my iPhone replaced couldn't scroll text anywhere near as fast as my old PC XT).

Update:Here's another example from The Inquirer:

The Instinct was partly designed by Sprint based on Java software and will have features that the iPhone lacks such as the ability to use EV-DO Rev A, the fastest cellular broadband technology available on the Sprint and Verizon Wireless networks.

This will make it a lot faster than the Iphone. It will also be smaller and feature a GPS chip

In theory, many phones are faster than the iPhone. In practice, the network engineers' hard work has been squandered by the poorly designed browsers shipped on just about everything else. The Instinct may avoid this trend but it's likely it will be yet another 3G phone which is slower than the iPhone if you browse on the phone but faster if you tether it to a laptop and use a realbrowser. This, incidentally, is another example of another over-emphasized iPhone critique: you can't tether a laptop but I've never needed to, either. A few hardcore road-warriors would need a 3G card but most people can find a WiFi hotspot if they need more than web+email.