What the iPhone taught me is to ignore cell phone reviews that dedicate most of their space to listing specs and features. Whoever wrote this review is not experiencing the phone the way I would, or the way any typical user would. Does he really need to tell us that the calculator has "a very limited set of functions" but that "Luckily, you can find third-party alternatives?" What kind of readers does this guy have that he's not afraid of losing them to boredom at this point?
Another case in point: I found the section about the web browser buried on page six underneath a larger section devoted to audio quality, which includes frequency response graphs and a table of audio measurements. And when it comes to the web browser, it says it "would have used somewhat more user-friendly interface" and "could certainly use a bit of fine tuning." It describes how to bypass the "unresponsive" and "slow" zoom feature by tapping a text section to zoom it but notes that it "is sometimes a hit and miss thing as the web browser fails to fit the text on screen." If you ask me, you don't want to use this review to illustrate that Apple is "behind" on cell phone technology.
What kind of readers does this guy have that he's not afraid of losing them to boredom at this point?
The kind of readers this "guy" has are the 2+ million unique people that visit per month (see compete.com chart) who are actually interested in every nook and cranny, pro and con, detailed form and function, and in-depth overview they need to make an logic-based, informed, $700 decision. First-version phones can be notorious for having major problems, and those issues need to be discovered before blowing a grand buying one.
All the iPhone taught you to do is ignore the negatives of balanced phone reviews, because the majority of your comment is
1) attacking the layout of the review and
2) restating a few pre-release issues of which the iPhone had plenty itself
What do you expect from a review? That it'll hide all the problems and only tell you the positive features of the phone? I certainly wouldn't trust a review website that does that.
As I said before, I bought a Nokia N95 back in 2007 that had 8gb, GPS, 3G support, Google&Nokia Maps, music player, FM radio, 5 megapixel camera, and VGA video support. I also get Google Voice, and while there aren't as many Symbian apps in total, let's just say I don't feel like I need iFart Mobile. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention I can easily take my phone to any GSM carrier I want? I think I also forgot to mention I can do basic tasks you'd expect a phone to do, like MMS and choosing the sound for your alarm clock.
If there's any phone that's behind on tech, it's the iPhone. Not only do you get subpar performance, you're also locked into a little cage where Apple decides what you get to do, and to me that's not a phone for a hacker.
There were phones before the iPhone that had better feature lists and superior technical specs. They weren't better phones -- they were utter crap, in fact -- so don't expect that kind of comparison to be persuasive. Listing every technical spec and looking in every nook and cranny is just a distraction that shows that the reviewer doesn't understand what makes a phone good or bad. For instance, to expand on my example of the web browser, consider the amount of space he gives to the calculator and alarm clock (combined 9 lines of text and 5 screenshots) vs. the web browser (15 lines of text and 6 screenshots.) That's just poor allocation of time and attention.
If you're willing to hack around in a phone, then a jailbroken iPhone offers very similar software functionality. At that point your tradeoff is polished user interface versus a better camera and FM radio.
However, dkarl is arguing his point from "the way any typical user would" As a "typical user", if he's easily annoyed by how an in-depth phone review is structured, I could hardly imagine the litany of complaints he would come up with when the typical user was subjected to the mess of software and hacks required just to enable a few basic features that one can get from a $20 candybar.
I think the majority of our disagreement comes from the difference in the type of users we are. I'm a power user and have owned 7 phones prior to my N95 in the past 5 years. Dkarl seems to just want a basic fashion-phone and does not really care about having a bleeding-edge mobile device.
Even worse, users like me who do figure out how to use the features may not want to. Personally, I'm the kind of user who walked around for years saying, "I wish I had a web browser on my cell phone," when I did in fact have a web browser on my cell phone. It was just too crappy to be worth using. Apparently sometime when I wasn't paying attention "power user" was redefined to mean "feature freak," but given that definition I won't dispute my non-power user status.
Another case in point: I found the section about the web browser buried on page six underneath a larger section devoted to audio quality, which includes frequency response graphs and a table of audio measurements. And when it comes to the web browser, it says it "would have used somewhat more user-friendly interface" and "could certainly use a bit of fine tuning." It describes how to bypass the "unresponsive" and "slow" zoom feature by tapping a text section to zoom it but notes that it "is sometimes a hit and miss thing as the web browser fails to fit the text on screen." If you ask me, you don't want to use this review to illustrate that Apple is "behind" on cell phone technology.