What’s more annoying than iPhone hype? Not much, but I’ve finally found something. Or rather, it’s found me: People who fancy themselves electronics experts patting themselves on the back for regurgitating iPhone anti-hype they’ve read on the Internet. Yes, congratulations, you’ve figured out the surprising fact that the iPhone is incapable of curing cancer. Well done. But I’ve already had to wade through a million billion blog posts talking about its horrible horrible failings that make it the worst thing ever to befall the human race. I don’t need to listen to you yammering about the same thing less eloquently, thanks. Please shut up forever.
Speaking of the iPhone, it’s finally shattered the “Apple equals Nintendo” paradigm; apparently the phone was launched in copious supply on day one, outselling projections by 250% with plenty still available. It also costs way too much and is fairly close to the bleeding edge of American phone technology. So yeah, pretty much the opposite of Nintendo these days. Ah well, it was a beautiful comparison while it lasted.
Meanwhile at 1UP, I’ve compared Pokémon Battle Revolution to cocaine cut with Dran-O. Oh, yeah, and I wrote that huge-ass preview about Contra 4… the one I teased all last week but never actually linked from here. Eh heh.
Coming tomorrow: Cake!
Yay cake!
…Is it magic cake?
“What’s more annoying than iPhone hype?”
Working for Apple support, being on a completely unrelated project, being thrown into half-ass training for an hour, being put on the phones with hundreds/thousands of calls in queue with almost no training because Apple didn’t train anywhere near enough agents to support it. Oh, and Apple instituting mandatory overtime for it, too.
i dunno, i’d say that the pro-iphone jizzfest is just as annoying as the anti-iphone jealous raging.
Any chance of retronauts returning this month?
Walter Mossberg digs the iPhone. That’s all I need to hear. Well, that and an eventual price drop.
No retro roundup this week?
So did you buy one?
Vera said that?
Non sequitur?
1. Yes, Retronauts may actually return this week.
2. Yes, there’s a Retro Roundup now online.
3. No, I did not buy one.
4. Uh… Batmobile lost its wheel and Joker got away?
Excellent, thank you.
iPhone launch is the new PS3 launch. Except for the muggings and the eBay resellers.
Yay, I got to be annoyed by the same conversation.
Well, I would have been if I gave two spinning shits about telephones. Which I don’t, just to be excessively clear. Damn teknologee.
SMASH LOOMS
Is it just me, or is does “outselling projections by 250% with plenty still available” sound somewhat self-contradictory?
How is that contradictory? Pre-launch projections were that the iPhone would sell 200,000 in its first weekend, it sold half a million. It just means Apple made and shipped enough to vastyl exceed the demand for the first weekend, which is actually normal, sensible business. Idiotic video game launch strategies have warped many people’s idea of what makes good sense.
I’m no cell phone guy, but I guess that in order to compete against the iPhone, all the other cell phone makers are going to improve their handsets and software a lot, and they’ll do it on their low cost units. 2 or 3 years of this competition should bring us plenty of high quality, low cost options from several different vendors.
I don’t care one way or the other about the iPhone!
Not to really stand up for Pokemon Battle Revolution (because it is pretty mediocre) but its one redeeming feature is the fact that you can battle against random people online whereas the DS is friend code only.
I am an electronics doctor! And I say the iphone, just like the itunes before it, are shit. Quite honestly, I’m better off buying cheap chinese equivalents that let me use any file format I like and pretty much do what I want for $500 less.
Is DRM an issue for anyone anymore?
Andrew: I went through the same thing when the iPod was released back in 2001. Nothing like having an hour’s worth of exposure with the thing, then thrown off the PowerBook queue and into a sea of calls from people who had no idea how to work the thing they had just plonked down five Benjamins for. Some of them didn’t even know what it *was*.
Which call center do you work at? I was at Elk Grove.
The best part of the iPhone hype was sitting in a hotel lobby with CNN playing on the TV and seeing that the closed-caption guy, unable to keep up with the conversation, referred to the iPhone as “APPLE’S LATEST (three-second pause) THINGAMA-HOOCHY.”
djS: Brownsville. Yeah, that sounds about right, but they should have been a bit more prepared at this point. I thought I was done with the insanity when I transferred from iPod (2 Christmases dealing with that drained enough will to live), but here I am again.
Stupid American phones. There are phones in Asia that are twice as good for half the cost and we get this iPhone shit.
Morzaz: Final Fantasy VII Before Crisis says it all. Better than having the internets, not the like the internets thing.
Love the last line of your first paragraph. Just gotta say that.
I’m glad that you’re implying that you’s a cake-guy instead of a pie-guy. If you have nothing nice to say, you’re talking about pie, that’s what I always say.
Also, could Contra 4 look more like shit? It’s like, yeah, when you put the dual screens together it seems like it could be a nice game. But when you imagine how it will actually look with the separated screens…. well, pure crapola.