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Short Takes: What went wrong with the iPhone

By SD Times News Team

August 1, 2008 — (Page 1 of 3)
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.

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

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