Well Colour Me Shocked... not.
Apr. 5th, 2007 09:34 am
InformationWeek Weblog: iPhone Dead After 40 Minutes?
Well, unlike Eric in this article who pretty much says, "Apple couldn't be like that WAHHH!", I'm not surprised, and it matched what I've heard myself from inside Cingular too.
I also heard that as recently as 3 months ago, the Network Test team weren't being allowed handsets, instead Apple guys were turning up with black box test units. That doesn't auger well either.
The battery life shouldn't be a surprise. I've also heard rumours that the battery isn't removable, but that would be dumb. Actually, its even more dumb in pre-production test models because you expect the battery to hose down in minutes and you typically want to have them wired up in strange ways to see where the drain is.
I'm also not all that surprised by the UI foibles. That's pretty common on a new phone when you've left it a long time before you test on the real network.
One of the problems MS had in moving to the phone world is that embedded software when connected to a network doesn't behave the way you expect it, and, at the end of the day, there is no real substitute for attaching mule devices to a live network and seeing what happens. If you've built really good software but only tested it with an ethernet or wifi link to the outside world, you'll not have prepared yourself for the latency you see in networks - especially a US one.
It looks pretty, but I still think Apple has bitten off a lot more than it can chew here.