Home › DMW Daily › July 23, 2007

Analysis: The iPhone Backlash

Authored by Jay Baage on July 23, 2007 - 2:55am.
More bad news for Apple. A team of computer security consultants say that they managed to take control of iPhones through a WiFi connection or by tricking users into going to a Web site that contains malicious code. This allowed them to tap the wealth of personal information the phones contain.

The security consultants, working for Independent Security Evaluators, did the hack as a test of its clients’ computer security and Steven M. Bellovin, a professor of computer science at Columbia University, said to the New York Times that it “looks like a very genuine hack”.

However, he also added that: “It’s not the end of the world; it’s not the end of the iPhone.” He is of course right. But this is just of many (more or less) negative stories about the iPhone that have turned up once the initial hype died off somewhat.

Scott Karp, DMW contributor and editor of Publishing 2.0, has written extensively about the network problems with AT&T that iPhone-users have experienced.

Shelly Palmer, President of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences - who oversees the Advanced Media Technology Emmy Award – recently blogged about what reads like a laundry list of problems he has had with his iPhone.

I think that some problems are to be expected from a groundbreaking new product like the iPhone version 1.0.

In fact, I think few people really thought it was going to work flawlessly. Moreover, if a phone is only as good as the network it is on, than dropped calls and slow data-speeds should also come as no surprise to iPhone users.

Shelly Palmer signs off his piece with these words of advice about whether you should buy one or not:

“If you are seeking knowledge about the future of personal communications and want to ‘see for yourself,’ sure. Otherwise, I'd wait for at least one, if not two, generations. iLove my iPhone. I truly do. It's just not suitable for the purpose for which it was designed. This may sound negative, but it's not. We all own many beautiful things that don't really do much. My iPhone is techno-art and I'm happy to have it."

There you have it. My only addition to all of this is that the iPhone competitors hardly work flawlessly either.

I have a Blackberry Pearl on T-Mobile. It completely crashed after four months to the point that it had to be returned. But unlike with the iPhone, T-Mobile doesn’t do any in-store exchanges. If your Blackberry is defective, you have to send it in and the whole process has taken weeks (since I’ve been traveling). And T-Mobile’s network sucks too.

So, either way you are screwed.

Perhaps carrying two phones is not such a bad idea after all, at least until the network and smart-phone technologies get more refined.

Now, after sinking up to half a G+ into a device that doesn’t work properly and being ridiculed as a yuppie with two phones as a result, this is just the price you have to pay to be an early adopter, I guess.    

Oh, the wonders of technology!

Jay Baage

Flickr photo credit: dawholagn

Published in DMW Daily, July 23, 2007
tags: Mobile | Internet | Video | Tech | Apple | BlackBerry | iPhone | Shelly Palmer | Scott Karp |



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