Will iPhone remorse become the next catch-phrase?

I have been following some reviews, impressions and "fondles" of the iPhone that are appearing every few minutes on the web and it leads me to wonder how many of those 500,000+ phones sold over the weekend will be returned due to "iPhone remorse"?  Quite a few people are running into the shortcomings of the iPhone and are letting us know how they feel about them.

Jeff Kirvin, long-time mobile aficionado resisted the urge to buy an iPhone and gives us his take no prisoners take on the iPhone:

Let’s look at this objectively. This is, at minimum, a $500 phone thathas no tactile feedback for dialing, no voice dial, no smart dial (iedialing 5478 to narrow your contacts to KIRV), no Bluetooth stereoheadset support, no dial-up networking support for an attachedcomputer, 2.5G data that is normally about 2-3 times dial-up modemspeed, no video recording, no MMS for sending pictures, only takespictures at 2MP and automatically resizes them to VGA for email (no wayto override either of those sizes). The SIM card is removable and willwork in other devices, but other SIMs will not work in this GSM worldphone, so you’ll have to pay AT&T roaming charges to use thisoutside the US. Unlike every other phone available today, there is nofree 14-day grace period and if you buy an iPhone today and return ittomorrow, you’ll have to eat a 10% ($50-60) restocking fee. The batteryis not only not removable, and when it dies (after 300-400 fullcharges) you have to send it back, for a fee, to Apple and get itreplaced, meaning you’ll be without your cell phone for Apple’sstandard 3 business days. And as for talk time, Mobile Tech Reviewreports that an hour long call dropped the battery to 15%.

PC Magazine says the iPhone is a great media player but a lousy phone:

Poor business e-mail and PIM connectivity.Bad audio quality on phone calls. Tons of "GSM buzz" on nearbyspeakers. Virtual keyboard hard to type on. No phone functionality withiPod speaker docks. No FM radio.

Download squad points out that anything iPhone can do a Windows Mobile smartphone can do better:

Sure, the new phone is the coolest thing since sliced bread wasreplaced by low-carb bagels. But aside from an innovative new interfaceand one of the best web browsers ever to grace a mobile device, does itreally do anything new?

Mobile Gadgeteer Matt Miller returned two of the three iPhones and is trying to decide if he’s going to keep the last one:

And yes, it is a lot of fun and I think the user experience is a blast.It will be interesting to see what people really think of it thoughafter the novelty wears off and they need to get something done.

Our own Kevin Tofel returned his iPhone before he ever got it.

Lastly, the closed nature of the iPhone is just not appealing to me.I’ve used Windows Mobile devices since 2000. That means I’ve had sevenyears of third-party application options; taking that away is reallytough to swallow right now. I expect we’ll see some great web-basedapps for the iPhone but it’s just too limiting of an environment fornow.

So what do you think?  Will we see a lot of iPhone remorse (remember where you first heard that phrase)?

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post