Why Maddox Is Wrong About iPhone

Update: Several questions have come up why this post exists especially since maddox’s post is more than a year old. The point is not to sway maddox.  Lot of people get swayed/inspired by maddox and point out to that page as the reason behind them not purchasing the iPhone. There are legitimate reasons for not buying an iPhone but maddox’s reason’s don’t cut it. This article shows why

Maddox had written a post on iPhone, essentially  labeling it worthless and proclaims that E70 as the better phone. I haven’t used E70 but have used E71 which is the hottest selling E series phone right now. Maddox’s post was not a review or a fair comparison. It was basically slamming the iPhone. Let us have a look at some of the criticism’s/complaints.

• Keyboard sucks. Typing things require too many keystrokes: That the keyboard sucks is a personal opinion. Some people prefer a physical keyboard and some find a virtual keyboard equally usable if not better. I don’t know how he got the 9 keystrokes thing but it is definitely wrong. Tapping on the special characters keyboard button in iPhone opens the special character keyboard and it stays open until you tap on it. So if you want to type (…) it is 7 keystrokes. The two extra keystrokes which is incidentally the same as E71 because it doesn’t have a dedicated parenthesis button.
• iPhone = Phone + iPod + Internet Communication Device is BS. iPod is just an mp3 player: iPod is just not any other mp3 player. iPod along with iTunes made managing,buying and playing music easy. iPod succeeded not due to marketing but because of the fact that it was and is the best mp3 player available in the market. (If apple is so good at marketing as maddox claims then why is Mac share of computers less than 10%?).  Joel’s review of E71 has a good section on why iPod is not just any other mp3 player
  

  The music player is adequate, but not great. It’s amazing how something as simple as playing MP3s is so fraught with minor problems… Apple makes it look easy to build an MP3 player, so when someone else tries, it’s always surprising to see just how hard it is to get right. On the E71

  • The sound quality is not quite as good as Apple
  • It takes too many steps to shuffle music
  • You hear unexplained static in the headphones when no music is playing.
  • The volume control has exactly ten choices. It reminded me of those old AT&T public telephones with three amplification choices for the hearing impaired. You have to choose between too soft and too loud.
  • When you’ve listened only to a part of a long podcast, the phone doesn’t remember where you were up to, so if you go back to it, you have to search around for the point where you left off.

  Internet communication device: It is called an internet communication device because it has a full featured browser, wifi and has a dedicated email client.  It even has VoIP applications. Note that Nokia calls its 810 “Internet Tablet” for pretty much the same reasons.

• Cannot customize ringtones ? Nope. No longer true. You can make your own custom ringtones with nothing but iTunes and mp3s
• Cannot record Voice? Nope. there are tons of applications (free and paid) which can do that iTalk recorder, Quick voice Recorder etc
• Instant Messaging. Oh Yes. Palringo gives you access to AOL, Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ etc.  That the application is free is the icing on the cake. That the application cannot run in the background is still a limitation until apple rolls out the “push” feature.
• Voice Dialing. Of Course. There are both free(Cactus) and paid (Voice Dialler) apps which can be used for voice dialing. There is the inconvenience of opening an another app but this is not a feature I guess most people use. I haven’t yet met a single person who uses voice dialing regularly.
• Storage: What the heck does he mean by “Unlimited. The E70 can use hot-swappable 2 GB mini SD cards, so you can have as much storage as you want.” That’s just arguing for argument sake. No one carries around mini SD cards for their phones. Only people I know who carry multiple SD cards are professional photographers.

That leaves us now  with Video, MMS , Copy/Paste , Closed Platform (Only Apple approved apps) and Non replaceable battery.  Not such a huge list of negatives  but some of these are very important factors to consider when buying a new phone.  But please don’t base your decision on what maddox has said or feel good because maddox agrees with your views that iPhone is terrible. Maddox was ranting and like most rants it is heavily biased. Just because maddox is an internet celebrity does not make his rant factually correct or worth following.

There are a quite a few legitimate reasons why an iPhone would be the wrong phone for some people but “because maddox said so” isn’t one of them. If you are considering E71 (which you should if want a smartphone and is not too enthusiastic about iPhone) you can read my detailed review or Joel’s and come to your own conclusions.

Update: As one of the comments points out maddox wrote that article when iphone first came out and some of the software mentioned in this post did not exist then implying that maddox was right then. But that is still not true. That’s because even the original iPhone users can make use of these software right now. The original iPhones haven’t become obsolete. Maddox is wrong because most of the criticisms of the iPhone could and have been addressed by software updates and third party software. . But the E series still have their clunky UI and unpolished third party software. Applications and games iPhone applications leave the symbian ones in the dust in terms of both quality and value for money. For example take chess: Symbian chess games as show cased on symbian site range from $9.99 – $14.99. Compare that with Deep Green for iPhone which has a lovely UI an very competent AI for just $7.99.

There is no denying the fact that the original iPhone had some deficiencies and restrictions which had to be addressed. Maddox is wrong not because he pointed it out. He is wrong because he wrote off the device.  While apple continued innovating (Application Store) and made the iPhone a platform more than just a phone, the E series is largely unchanged.

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Manu is a Ruby on Rails developer,blogger, amateur entrepreneur, Mac and Linux enthusiast and a technophile. Read more ››

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