The Jesus Phone

After two weeks of travel, I returned to base only to find out that the entire Western World was all a-twitter about the debut of Apple's iPhone. I have to hand it to the marketing mavens at Apple; they really know how to gin up hype. Of course, the key is not to let anybody actually use the product before its release. This permitted people to imagine that the iPhone would actually be better than anything out there; sort of a savior from the cell-phone hell that we all have had to endure for the past ten years. Kinda like Jesus Christ. (Hence the title, which I borrowed from the Friday Wall Street Journal article that critiqued the launch.)

I am going to go out on a limb, here, and say that the iPhone is going to disappoint all but the most rabid (and most affluent) Apple bigots. Why, you might ask? Well, it's really simple: the iPhone is going to be maddeningly slow! Especially when it comes to surfing the Web. The sexy ad copy notwithstanding, the iPhone is significant only because of its operating system, which is important, but mostly to gear-heads and tech nerds. To many end-users, the thing is going to lose its luster very quickly. It'll be like finding out that your $45,000 Porsche can't go over 55 mph!

First of all, it's no better as a phone than anything else sold at Cingular or AT&T stores, which is to say that it's slightly below average since they market some of the worst crap around. In addition, AT&T can only offer the iPhone on its low-power, low-speed, low-grade network, the "Edge" network. You heard me; the iPhone is not 3G or GSM-enabled! Most of the "old fashioned" phones they've been selling at Cingular are way faster! The only hope an iPhone user has of getting decent response time for e-mail or web use is by connecting to a local wireless hot-spot.

All of this is true because the geniuses at Apple want to wait for a year or so before introducing a truly up-to-date phone. Just like they did with the Mac back in 1984, when the first generation Macintosh was shipped with a 3.5" disk instead of a hard drive! Two years later, Apple included the hard drive in its second generation machine. But they had accomplished their real mission, which was to get the Graphical User Interface (known in the PC world as Windows) out before it could be upstaged by Microsoft.

So, look for all kinds of raves from the usual quarters, followed by serious questions from people who don't drink the Silicon Valley Kool-aid served by Steve Jobs and his minions!