The Great iPhone Letdown of 2011

Thursday, October 13th, 2011 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor

With so many rumors swirling around the internet for the past few months, it was easy to get caught up in the iPhone 4S rumor hoopla and the endless speculation on what was supposed to be released (LTE, bigger screen, no physical buttons, edge-to-edge glass, and more).

With WSJ.com coming out the day before the iPhone 4S reveal, stating that Sprint was supposed to get the iPhone 5 exclusively for a quarter for a mere $20 billion while all the other other carriers slummed it with the iPhone 4S, people had extremely high hopes for something cool and insanely great (bigger, faster, stronger!).

Instead, I felt that we were treated to a disappointing keynote by folks with questionable stage presence and a product full of tech from 6 months ago which are easily trounced by Android phones that are themselves soon to be updated and therefore outdated.

Yes Apple, the company that is synonymous with planned obsolescence, had managed to let the world down with a product that is already obsolete. Could you imagine waiting for an entire year for a brand new product, hoping to shove that shiny new powerful phone in your Android-wielding friends’ faces only to find you waited all this time for something that’s 6 months or more behind the curve?

A quick comparison to illustrate my point:

So what’s an iPhone user to do in order to feel adequate, superior and special yet again?

They could point to Nuance-powered voice features of iOS 5, but voice features like this have been out on Android for a long while now and have recently debuted on Windows Phone 7.5 (aka Mango). Also, these features just weren’t hyped and marketed like they were the most amazing things ever created.

Even then, these voice features aren’t going to be very usable. Why? When do you need to use voice powered features most often? Most likely while driving. When is it hardest for voice features to actually work? Again, while driving. Why? Lots of reasons: passengers, tire noise, traffic and other environmental factors. Unfortunately, Siri is most usable exactly when you need it least – when you’re sitting around.

Does this open the door for other Operating Systems of the mobile world? Quite possibly. If anything, the door that has opened for Android is going to open up just a little wider despite the off-the-chart sales of the 4S after a 16-month wait.

But Windows Phone 7, while still cool and my personal choice for my day-to-day phone, probably still won’t move the needle in the consumer space due to a number of reasons (bad consumer marketing message, salespeople pushing Android phones).

So what do you think? Is it enough? Does the pricing help make a difference?

 

Tags: iPhone