All Articles Tagged thestreet.com

Pop quiz: You’re not Mossberg, Pogue, or Baig and you don’t work for anything like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or USA Today, so you don’t have a shiny new iPhone 3G to review, but you do have a couple minutes of web vid to fill, and a massive amount of iPhone hype to jack. What do you do?

If you’re theStreet.com’s Gary Krakow — the genius who previously suggested that the iPhone should dump OS X and run Windows-fr33kin-Mobile — then you pump yourself up as much as possible, and dump all over the BIG 3’s reviews.

Got your yuck-brown highlighter ready? Good. Go through and strike out all the positive stuff, mumble quickly what’s too important to strike out, and then harp ill-informedly about whatever tiny troubles you can find. Nothing Windows Mobile couldn’t fix anyway, right?

Sure, there’ll be a market for this type of flame-bait manipulation, lots of blog links (guilty as charged!) and fan boy fury, but is the loss of credibility really worth it Gar? And can’t they at least find a “reporter” to interview you without questions so canned and leading that the simple math they run is the only thing that makes me believe they’re not entirely animatronic?

Yeesh. When exactly did theStreet.com become roadkill?

Thanks to Joe (The Reptile) for the tip!

Here’s an idea: take the most revolutionary, innovative, and talked about smartphone in years and suggest it should chuck it’s industry changing multi-touch, UNIX-solid OS for something every manufacturer saddled with is desperate to burry (see Windows Mobile, HTC Touch Diamond), or something so old and Java-limited its only claim to fame is server-bound “pushing” wrapped in ever-increasingly iPhone derived packaging (see Blackberry OS, Bold, Thunder, Storm).

So, in other words, in the land of individuality and excellence, in order to succeed the iPhone should abandon everything that makes it… the iPhone, and embrace the mediocrity of lowest-common smartphone denominator?

That’s what Gary Krakow (we don’t know who he is either…) tells a theStreet.com reporter so disturbingly qualified she fails to challenge him on any of the near-constant stream of fallacies, ignorance’s, or unqualified statements he makes. (Here’s a freebie “But didn’t Apple already license Exchange ActiveSync from Microsoft in an event so widely seen it nearly brought down the Internet?”)

The iPhone needs to up its game? Do either of you depressing examples of modern media even know what game Apple’s playing?

But enough about them. Here’s our take on whether or not Apple should ditch iPhone OS X for Windows Mobile or Blackberry OS:

How about NO!

How about Microsoft is desperately sending reassurance letters to their partners, pointing out their sales numbers, precisely because the iPhone is what it is? How about RIM is spinning every which way but loose, alternately iDissing, iDeveloping, and iCloning, precisely because the iPhone is doing what its doing?

Bottom line, does any serious-minded journalist or pundit alike (if any such animal still exists!) really think the smartphone space would be better off with Apple merely producing just another Windows Mobile or Blackberry device or form factor, instead of offering another choice, and undeniably pushing the entire industry out of complacency?

We didn’t think so.

(And for the record, yes, we are calling up Rob Enderle and warning him theStreeties are gunning for his “job”…)

Yeesh.