Apple iPhone; Pretty dumb for a “Smartphone”

ZOMG! He’s got an iPhone! Lets all worship him and give him salutes every time he passes by! This the mentality of many people have with iPhones, but the point is, when you come to think of it, the iPhone isn’t THAT much of an engineering marvel, just an overhyped slice of Apple pie. Your opinion may be different, but here’s the lowdown;

1. Performance; 600MHz ARM Cortex A8 application processor, PowerVR HW Graphics Acceleration and 256 MB of RAM. Definitely nothing exciting like nVidia Tegra or Creative Zii here. Now, the Sony Ericson Satio and Samsung i8910HD both have pretty much the same hardware specs as the 3GS, but no-ones hyping about that are they? Sure, these two phones aren’t as responsive as the iPhone, but I’ll tell you exactly why.
2. Cutting Corners; How does the iPhone achieve such a smooth user experience using the same old (or new technically) hardware as many other phones? Cutting corners of course! Why is photo browsing so smooth? Because iTunes converts them before they’re transferred onto the phone. Why does the iPhone have such a low resolution display? So that the processor doesn’t have to work its ass off redrawing screen elements.Why can’t you multi-task? Because it would make scrolling a crawl (just try downloading a podcast and browsing a list, you’ll see what I mean)
3. Wheres the Flash?; Ok, when I say “flash”, I really do mean both of them, the Camera and more importantly, the browser. Ever wondered why the browser on the iPhone is so fast? Well, the absence of flash pretty much sums it up.
4. More apps make the iPhone “better”, but not necessarily smarter; If you want to E-mail someone’s Facebook, then you’d have to download the Facebook app, if you want to check the weather, you have to load the weather app and and if you want to check your Twitter, well there’s an app for that as well. This definitely doesn’t follow the general trend that people want information faster, as something like the Nokia N97 would display all this information quickly on the home screen, Palm Pre would merge your contacts seamlessly together, but with the iPhone, you just get a bland grid of icons. Sure its minimalist, but definitely not up to date.
5. Music and Video, what music and video? From what I can see, the iPhone obviously strikes out as a multimedia phone with its iPod based music player and large display, however, just because it does a lot of things, it doesn’t exactly mean it does them well. Frequency response might be brilliant and flat, but music sounds exactly that, flat with no life, and as for video playback, you could look elsewhere as contrast ratios on the LCD are unbelievably bad. That’s just comparing it to the HTC Diamond 2 (which doesn’t have the best display in the world), but comparing it to the Samsung i8910HD’s AMOLED display just makes it look pathetic.
6. “Sorry, I think the receptions bad, can you repeat that?” This phrase is used so often when I make calls on my iPhone, I might as well just tape record it and play it when necessary. For a phone, call quality and reception is terrible, and this is totally not expected coming from a high end phone is it?

So you see, the iPhone isn’t that revolutionary when you come to think of it. Sure it’s iconic and somewhat useful with the thousands of (mainly useless) apps, but when you compare it directly with some of the other phones in its class, it really doesn’t give the same impression as it once did.

I must dash though; I’d better upload this before I lose my 3G signal.