I’ve edited and interspersed my own comments throughout. Here’s Ken’s original post about the iPhone and why he thinks it’s a steaming pile of warm January sh!t.

Alec wrote A letter to Steve Jobs about iPhone I hope, Steve reads it, but I doubt it. Sadly Jobs is still of dancing on the high of reinventing telecommunications in his own head. Alec is right on the mark, while Jobs is off the map in hallucination. Beware Steve…there be dragons there.

There’s no denying the ego factor. I think Apple’s ego is actually an asset to them right now.

Richard says IPhone – re-inventing the phone? I disagree. They’re reinventing the iPod. They’re aiming at their own market and will score a near builseye. Reinventing themselves in their own image.

We all have an agenda for the iPhone, just as we all did when iChat added voice. We wanted it to be SIP-based, and it was. We wanted it to be open, and it wasn’t. Just as Skype isn’t. But was it a walled garden? Hardly.  The iPhone itself is something we want to be open and user-empowering. Nobody wants that more than me. But let’s not forget, the iPhone isn’t some power-play to keep the Big Telco Nazis  in control of things.  Cingular’s role in Apple’s deal is a de facto one. If you’re going to ink a deal with a carrier, it might as well be the biggest and most open one (or least closed one). Hence, Cingular. And believe me, Apple doesn’t need Cingular to make these phones sell above quota. The Cingular/AT&T deal wasn’t about marketing from Apple’s point of view. It was about making the phone just work.

Dan York notes Apple’s iPhone as a platform for Skype, Gizmo, Jajah and everyone else… . he’d take one and try is, but being outside the locked down footprint of Cingular (or have they abandoned their brand and reinvented AT&T this morning), Dan’s out of luck.

As far as I know, WiFi is outside the locked down footprint of Cingular, and while Apple has insisted all third-party apps must be certified for the iPhone, they haven’t definitively rules out VoIP software. Where is this FUD eminating from, seriously?

Andy catches the importance of the WiFi link in Wi Apple? I’m not sure WiFi, even advances in MuniWiFi are going to be as big as some of us once thought. I think WiFi is going to be overrun by WiMAX and EVDO Rev A like technologies. Frankly, I think 802.11xxx is going to be leapfrogged and tossed in the grave within 18 months. It’s a technology that can’t possibly keep up.

WiFi is well-understood, dirt-cheap, and consumerized. I’m sure a future revision of the iPhone will permit for behaving as a WiMAX node, but are you going to be using WiMAX on your cell phone in the next 18 months?  I think not.

Jeff Pulver nails Jobs perfectly – Is the Apple iPhone Evolutionary or Revolutionary? has to feel liked getting pinged in the forehead with a ball peen hammer. I’d ask it differently – Has the creative genious that once was Apple fallen so far that an incremental, minor play in the general direction of telecommunications is heralded by Jobs’ own ego a reinventing an industry? That’s sounds like the mindles rantings of a dying geriatric under the speel of agony and morphine. The iPhone isn’t revolutionary.

I agree that the iPhone is NOT categorically revolutionary. But it does represent a number of firsts. The UI with multi-touch is obscenely cool, no question. And the graphical feedback on the phone I saw demonstrated by Jobs makes Nokia’s gear look antiquated. These may not be revolutionary, but I’ll take positive steps. The worst part of a cell phone has always, always, always been the UI. So I welcome these evolutions.

Martin calls it iPhoney? and an undercooked business model? Undercooked? It’s the sushi of business models I think. It’s a business model propelled by ego. As Martin notes, it’s not disruptive at all (expcet, I think, to the iPod market).  He says(emphasis mine) – The iPhone as launched is not a smartphone, it’s a featurephone
and fashion accessory.

I disagree. It measures up and surpasses many other “smart phones”. Calendaring,  synchrnization, interactive address book, push messaging, and who could damn “visual voicemail”?  Regardless, there are features in the iPhone that actually DO outfox the other  smartphones on the market. So it’s a smartphone AND a fashion accessory. Two for one?

But the touch screen will turn out to be a
liability: like programming a computer with only a 5V battery and piece
of wire, in being able to do everything, you end up being excellent at
nothing.  I agree it will be execellent at nothing.

It will be mediocre at anything, at best. In my words, it will be crap.

The touch screen will be a disaster. The closed interface assures that it’s another all your tunes calls stones Apples are belong to us. Apple is the worst offender and not understanding open standards and extensibility on the planet. Worse that Microsoft.

Perhaps this is why they use an open-source kernel in their OS. OR why they’ve steered clear of cramming all of their home-grown networking protocols into a hell-to-troubleshoot RPC package as Microsoft has done. Apple ain’t perfect, but let’s be honest here.

Limited features, locked in to a single carrier, not open to third  party software.

Visual voicemail, messaging, qwerty, itunes, video camera, storage, finally a friendly chat UI for SMS, movie playback, automatic aspect change, high density screen, iphoto on the fly?  You call these features limited?  Don’t bash the features just because you think Apple made a poor choice in not coming out with an all-SIP device (hell Apple needs to make some money on these) or because they chose one walled-garden carrier in which to plant the future seeds of iPhone sales.  The features are what they are, and if you call them proprietary, fine, but don’t call them “limited”.

iPhone sales will doubtless skyrocket, but it will never begin to live up to potential. It was introduced with a big L on its’ forehead. The iPhone is Apple’s Zune. And fair enough that both companies have that kind of learning experience.

How would iPhone sales skyrocketing be a learning experience? And the comparison to the Zune is something I’m grappling with. The Zune is tanking. People don’t want to share their music over WiFi. People just don’t.

I want to think I’m was right in seeing this as the end of the PC and heralding the new micro-PC, but he’s wrong too. A PC, of any flavor, that’s a closed device, is another useless doorstop.

Well Ken is right on this one, bigtime right. The iPhone is clearly NOT a PC. But then again neither is a Blackberry.

The iPhone did succeed at one thing. It set the stage for the next generation of computing devices. Nokia N800, Nokia N-series in general, Nokia E-series, Blackberry, Windows Mobile devices – they’ll all surge while Apple figures out that they set the bar for a new device that they didn’t deliver. They better get their act hustling in order to not get left in the dust when the real micro-computer in handheld size takes off. They better be working today on reinventing the iPhone rather than an industry they do not understand.

I seem to remember hearing similar comments from music people at the time the iPod was first introduced. Oh and for the record Windows Mobile sucks

Ken, touche, and keep up the excellent work!