Clearly keen to elicit a mighty reaction from their audience (and get bloggers like us feverishly linking to their site, natch), CNET UK has declared the Apple iPhone to be “the worst phone in the world.” And just underline the point, they even made a graphic saying just that.
So are they on crack or have they just had some sort of mind melt down? After all, the iPhone is the Jesus Phone, the best, slickest, most wonderful gizmo to have ever existed in the history of the known universe. Isn’t it?
Well, the truth lies somewhere between, and they do have a point. Sometimes.
CNET lays into the iPhone, deriding its “pathetic” call quality due to its tiny speaker, with the microphone dismissed as being, “similarly craptastic.”
The iPhone’s well documented penchant for dropping calls and patchy O2 data coverage come under fire, as does the heat generated by the phone when you’re on a call.
Unsurprisingly, the iPhone’s poor battery life gets CNET in as tizzy, but then this could equally apply to most modern smartphones, although Apple’s daft insistence on sealed batteries means there’s no possibility of users lobbing a few spares in their bags.
The article rightly praises the iPhone for its web browsing, music and movie-playing abilities, vast oceans of applications, responsive touchscreen and crystal-clear user interface that make the phone a pleasure to use – it’s just the phone bit they’re getting in a tizzy about.
Wrapping up their sizeable rant, CNET describes the iPhone as, “inaudible, unconnected, on fire and out of battery,” concluding that why it might be the worst phone in the world, “it’s the best handheld computer ever invented.”
We have to say that we’ve always found the iPhone to be a reasonable performer as a phone, but certainly not up there with the best (the Palm Pre, for example, is noticeably superior in this regard), but when it comes to an all-round consumer multimedia gadget, there’s still nothing out there to beat it.
Tell us what you think readers!
Yeah, it’s a crap phone. Probably. Out of my 600 included contract minutes each month, I use fewer than 2, so what would I know? I don’t really have any requirement for a phone of any kind!
Heh another bullshit tech rant that produces a great headline…never seen that before! Cnet should be better than this…
As a phone it’s not brilliant. All the defects CNET point to are there. But I love it just the same.