We weren’t actually going to post anything…
…on the iPhone 4G leak, since the combination of the hundreds of posts and articles online, in the mainstream media, and on The View!, has really drained the life out of this story. However some lively comments, made to each other via email, made me think that it is still our civic duty as a tech and geek news website to say something about the 4G, so here is what we all think:
(oh and if you were on vacation, on the moon, for the past few days, and missed the news, simply hit up Gizmodo for a summary of all their iPhone 4G news… here)
Ryan:
MY 2¢ – My scepticism wants me to believe it’s a plant, but (and maybe I’m just buying into the hype here,) this really is the first time an Apple product has just been “found” in the wild. In all honesty, it may very well just be a mistake. A career-ending mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.
Gizmodo is handing out dick move after dick move on this one though…the worst of all being publishing the guy’s [the Apple employee who allegedly lost the phone] Facebook profile online. (If in fact Gray What’s-his-name is a real person…he has about 100-ish friends and you can’t send him a friend request.) Gizmodo publishing the letter from Apple asking to return the phone seems like a dick move, too.
The whole thing is fishy as hell.
At the end of the day, though…if it IS an elaborate viral, then KUDOS, because I’ve never sought info about an iPhone as religiously as I have for this one, except maybe for the 2007 launch.
Doug:
As for the iPhone thing, I don’t really have much to say on it. MAYBE it’s a staged leak, but it’s not something I’d want to bet on either way.
Here’s my comment, if you want to do something…
If there’s one thing that we’ve learned from this Apple iPhone 4G leak, viral marketing or not, is that there is a large and vocal subset of Apple fans who travel around with blinders on. The new iPhone is not so much an evolution of the iPhone 3GS design so much as it is Apple channelling the industrial design spirit of HTC, but don’t tell the true believers that. That goes for the software side of things too. With the rain drops on the screen representing real world rainy conditions, and social network integration into the contacts, I can’t help but see a heaping dose of irony that Apple is suing HTC. Maybe Cupertino secretly has some HTC fanboys in its midst?
Dave:
I totally agree the new iPhone design looks like an HTC phone.
Paul:
Well the reason it’s the highest traffic generating tech news item is that most tech sites are stupid and breathless and write a lot of copy about not much, am I right?
One should never do a story because ‘it’s big and everybody’s doing it’. One should only do a story if one actually believes that rationally it’s an important story.
That’s the way real journalists used to do, no idea HTF most of these tech outlets can call themselves journalists, because they’re not — they’re a thoughtless mob.
Anyone who posted this week a ‘OMG an iPhone and we’re so breathless about it, it was probably an intentional leak just to make us this breathless, just because outlets like ours are just that important to iPhone sales ‘WE ARE IMPORTANT MAYBE EVEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN ACTUAL DESIGN’, is not a real journalist.
Doug:
Not really. It’s a rare Apple product in the wild before release. Whether it’s REALLY a lost phone, or a planted one, I can’t say, and I wouldn’t give either scenario much better odds than the other.
Regardless of the circumstances, I think the circus would have been the same.
Dave, Obviously, I agree. If the corners didn’t have the signature iPhone curve to them, I’d say it could even be mistaken for a potential Diamond 3 candidate.
Alex:
now the story is all over the US TV media…
Ryan:
This thing has taken a trip through Stupidville and ended up in Morontown. Unreal. IT’S JUST A PHONE!
Paul:
I say report it as a minor news item in which the focus is on the actual features that can be confirmed as a result of this discovery, and entirely ignore issues of how it was discovered, whether Gizmodo was in the moral right, whether it was lost or stolen, because seriously all of that stuff is completely irrelevant to anybody.
I think it’s a big mistake to focus on the ‘controversy’ and ignore the features. The features are the only consequential part of the story; every other part of the story will be completely irrelevant to everyone in another week.
Doug:
I’m with you. Anyone can approach something the way they see fit, but personally all the ‘controversy’ is really sensationalistic and secondary to the actual handset itself. The fact that they haven’t released any footage of it powered up kind of makes it a “look at this nice piece of plastic” kind of thing.
Gizmodo DID say that the screen resolution was very high, which suggests Gruber’s 960×640 claims was probably right. Personally, I find that odd, because the screen is physically smaller than the older iPhones, and that’s really a waste from usability POV. 960×640 at the 3.2ish screen size of the new phone is about the same PPI as the Xperia X1’s 3 inch, 800×480 screen, which is not very finger friendly. Even a larger piece of glass like the HD2 you have to bring the screen into about 1 foot of your eyeball to start seeing pixel definition.
I can understand the choice of resolution, because it’s mere pixel doubling (probably using filters to smooth it), but why change the physical size of the screen, when that it’s a custom resolution anyways?
Paul:
Yeah the dpi is getting so high on these devices that the total resolution is starting to get pointless. It’s like CPU MHz vs. CPU stage count in the late ’90s.
…and that’s all we had to say about the iPhone 4G before we lost interest in talking about it. All I can add is that while physically looks likes a nice phone, it’s the software inside the counts, and I am not a fan of the Apple OS, even with the improvements that 4.0 will bring.
By the time the 4G is officially launched HTC will probably have something else coming soon, running Windows Phone 7, or Android 2.5, that will blow it out of the water….Apple had become a follower, not a leader.
