Kent Pribbernow

ummm cause it sucks…

http://www.thehotstop.info

signature…

I’m actually planning to buy an iPhone. Just bought a Mac Pro a few weeks ago and love it. I own, let’s see, 10 Macs?

I had two main points in my column. First, that the iPhone tries to do too much. That’s both conceptual and firsthand. Second, it’s not going to be a greater browser or document reader, even though Apple touts this as a top-line feature, because Apple chose to not offer a way to reformat Web pages or documents to flow to the screen. Instead, you zoom in and out and drag, which isn’t how most people read. At 100-percent scale, where text might be legible, most Web pages and Word documents won’t fit on the screen. There are mobile devices and software that can switch between real HTML rendering (not as good as the iPhone’s) and a readable mode. Same with Word docs, where they can extract the text with minimal formatting.

Third, it’s strange to buy an iPhone now, because Apple will absolutely have a 3G iPhone within a year, maybe six months. The EDGE network is too slow, and (this came out after my article was published) AT&T’s data plan doesn’t include any Wi-Fi hotspot access. Sure, you can use Wi-Fi for free in many places or pay a separate fee to another network operator. But see Walt Mossberg, David Pogue, etc.; they all complain about the EDGE–and they actually had iPhones to test.