tin_the_fatty weblog

(Written earlier.)

I am not sure everyone have grokked the reason for the iPhone’s success.

If you lay out a table of features comparing various “convergent” devices (i.e. the feature-p*ssing contest) then nope the iPhone isn’t that impressive. No 3G data, no Bluetooth stereo profile for music, and no 4-bands for networks everywhere. People complained about the lack of MMS, but I don’t remember having ever sent any MMS, and only received one or two MMSes from my own network operator as promotional items.

The thing is, the iPhone is the first accessible “smartphone” that doesn’t suck. The Nokia S60 I just got rid of sucked as a smartphone althou as a plain phone it worked okay. The (slightly older) Crackberry my employer imposed on me sucks as a phone, although I have been told that newer models are better, but they are relatively rare and expensive. The fact that unless you have some major corporate support (namely RIM’s own $$$ server software and Microsoft Exchange Server) you don’t get all the wireless PIM goodies makes a full-featured Crackberry not accessible to a lot of folks, so I wouldn’t count the RIM handsets (as good as they are) in.