Short Takes: What went wrong with the iPhone

By SD Times News Team

August 1, 2008 —

Apple’s Poor iPhone 3G Rollout
I’m not sure who coined the phrase “second coming” to refer to the release of the iPhone 3G. But sadly for Apple, while the new smartphone handset may have delighted the million-odd customers who were able to receive one, last month’s iPhone 3G launch left a left of potential customers bitter and angry.

In some stores, including ones I visited on launch day, phones were sold out within an hour of opening, a clear sign that Apple misjudged the demand that its extensive marketing campaign would cause. From a company known for its marketing acumen, hand-written signs saying “NO MORE IPHONES” on AT&T store windows in the U.S. left a bad taste. A week later, AT&T can only say that the handsets are “backordered.”

Meanwhile, Apple’s decision to do a simultaneous iPhone 3G rollout in many countries, at the same time opening up its App Store and providing a downloadable firmware update for the original iPhone and for the iPod touch, was equally a disaster. Customers reported difficulties in activating their phones and installing the software upgrades. Many customers said that after the upgrade, their original iPhone handset didn’t work for hours.

And that’s not all that Apple messed up on. Another part of the simultaneous launch was the revamping of its .Mac online service. The service, now named MobileMe, proved to be so buggy and unreliable that Apple sent out an apology letter to its customers and is offering them a free month of service.

Apple also acknowledged that its marketing, which used the word “push” to describe how MobileMe syncs the data on desktop Macintoshes and PCs with iPhones and iPod Touch devices, was misleading. Apple had implied that the data syncs were nearly instantaneous. That is incorrect.

While the MobileMe servers do indeed push changes out to wireless devices, desktops instead pull data during occasional sync sessions. That’s not instantaneous, not at all.

This isn’t good, Apple—we expected better. But there is some upside: The iPhone 3G is already old news, so we can get back to talking about other things. I certainly intend to.

Alan Zeichick

Green lights so far for HP+EDS
The independent proxy advisory firm ISS Governance Services recommended on July 11 that EDS shareholders vote for the US$13.9 billion acquisition of their firm by Hewlett-Packard. ISS studies proposed mergers and issues equivalent to the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

The deal also appears cool with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, as a 30-day waiting period passed without a word of anti-trust concern from the Feds. All that was left at the time of this writing was a European Union review, expected by July 25, and a vote by EDS shareholders at a special meeting scheduled for July 31.

HP’s smooth-so-far sailing on the EDS buyout contrasts with the stormy $19 billion deal for Compaq Computer in 2002. HP director Walter Hewlett, son of co-founder Bill Hewlett, led the opposition to the deal and had hoped for an ISS thumbs down to bolster his case. The ISS announcement endorsing the HP-Compaq deal was carried live on CNBC.

Robert Mullins

A penny saved…
After seeing a 24-inch iMac on a trip to my local Apple store the other day, I decided to open up a SmartyPig savings account to put money aside for buying one. SmartyPig takes money out of my checking each month and offers a 4.3% interest rate. My last two machines were self-made, but I really don’t feel like doing the research and assembling one this time around. The Mac’s simplicity and elegance are almost reason enough to pay a premium, but my experiences with Mac OS X are what sold me.

David Worthington

"No thank you" to e-books
If I live to be a hundred—and saints preserve me from that fate—I will never, ever, get the point of an e-book. No matter how sexy Amazon thinks it can make Kindle, there’s zero chance of it replacing the yards of paper and pasteboard that stretch through my flat.

To be truthful, I turn to books when I’ve had enough of computers and television, and the last thing I need is yet another device that needs special care and constant recharges.

Of course, e-books have other problems. I wouldn’t take a computer or a similar device to the beach or the park, because the lighting’s rarely favorable. Then there’s the matter of personal safety: Very few muggers are going to come up when one’s toting a book and demand it, but some thug is likely to decide that whatever the funny gadget is, it can probably be fenced for beer money. Finally, it’s about bragging rights: if you tell someone you have 200 e-books in your reader, that’s cool, but it doesn’t compare to the appreciative whistle when someone lays their eyes on a library that can be measured in fractions of a furlong.

P.J. Connolly

Related Search Term(s): Mobile development, Apple, Hewlett-Packard

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