Who cares if the product is hyped or not. Who cares if the guy next door already has one.

I don't use google for search because everyone else does, I use it because it works for me. If I start to find that Bing works better, I'll switch to that. Who cares if everyone else is using google or not.

Saying you don't want to use an iPhone because it's too locked up makes sense, even though I don't agree with that position. Saying you don't want to use an iPhone because of hype and fashion, that's cutting off your nose to spite your face.

You do realize that being anti-hype and anti-fashion is fashionable nowadays? ;)

I dislike hype and fashion because it is not rational, promotes strong emotions over judgement and it is costly for us as a society.

You could almost feel this guy's soul tear while writing this. For what, a phone? A corporation?

When the market slams Nokia in the face, they will feel it, not when a fanboy jumps ship. And Nokia is getting slammed pretty badly right now.

They need to control the Os less they become a comodity producer like Htc and Moto already are. Sony didn't go full-android, but they're a shadow of themselves. We'll see...

Nokia have their hopes set on Qt and MeeGo and that looks fine to me, even if I don't know whether they will ultimately succeed or fail.

I agree, the point I was trying to make was that deciding to _not_ buy a phone because it's fashionable is a fashion statement in itself. If the iPhone 4 is good, why not buy it regardless of how (over)hyped it is? Then again, I do see ideological/technical reasons not to buy the iPhone, for instance due to its closed nature.

I think Nokia could have challenged Apple if they had fully focused on Maemo when they first released the 770, and developed a culture of making better, more bug-free software. Now, I'm not so sure. Android has taken the place that Maemo could have had. Steve Jobs was actually right when he said that smartphones had "baby software" during the iPhone introduction - and the mobile industry didn't realize it at that point because _everyone_ were making baby software for their phones until Apple came along.

The people complaining that Apple didn't use the Newton OS for the iPhone doesn't realize that Apple would have been in the same position if they had (regardless of all the innovative features of the Newton).

I love QT for the desktop and I hope that Nokia can make it easily portable to phones... Things sound grim at the moment.

Hype is just marketing. The actual device is really nice. Just because the reality isn't quite at the level of "revolution", is it really necessary to discount the platform in its entirety?

I had a friend who refused to get an iPod. They were then stricken with using stuff by Creative, which were plagued with hardware issues. Getting them serviced was a chore that took months at a time without the player. They still refused to get an iPod. Even if the iPod was as problematic (in my experience it wouldn't be) she would have gotten replacements so easily by going into the Apple store.

Yes, 4G is really nice! But the 3GS and 3G were made to look much better than they really were. It's not so much the hype itself that bothers me, but that the reality was much less impressive:

- iPhone didn't have a flash until 4G and had a weak camera. I don't have a camera, I use my phone. - no multitasking until 4G. I've used multitasking for a lot of time and run multiple apps at once. - it was very expensive and not available in my country for my operator

With each iteration the iPhone has gotten better and better to the point where I would actually get one, if it weren't for two facts: I like to be able to run anything I want on my phone and I want to be able to program it.

I'm probably a very special case... I would not hesitate to recommend an iPhone to friends.