More on iPhone Coverage and….. Obama
We’ve said a couple of times below that the success of the iPhone is an important case study in how the Web’s information dynamics work. In light of that I was fascinated to see this piece by Javier Marti. It was written in autumn 2007 as the initial hype around the iPhone was dying down.
The Obama election campaign and its aftermath has parallels – which we will come to below albeit only briefly.Why is it important to Five Ideas? The Western ethos of progress through criticism is important; changing information dynamics seems to threaten the principle that criticism is good, and needs to be effective. If information dynamics are changing then we need to understand what it means for what is “true” and what the “truth-to-reality” cycle is becoming.
First iPhone.
Marti being close to the action points out all the negative reactions to iPhone at the time and as importantly points out that the iPhone’s biggest early success was to turn the US into a more mobile using population.
This graph from Nielsen suggests that during the initial launch period the iPhone secured close to 0.75% of all blog posts everywhere, which is a pretty amazing feat.
Still, many of those early reviews were negatives:
3. The camera is a simple application that has one button: The shutter. Picture quality is no where near exceptional.
4. SIM card is near impossible to open, if at all.
5. Web browser is slow, even over WLAN. Even the simple OneList web app that was created takes around 20 seconds to load over WLAN. You can not highlight, cut, copy, or paste and text from a website, and you can not save any images you find from a website either. The only nice thing about it is the tabbed browsing, which crashed when visiting Engadget and YouTube on two tabs. This is the only application that allows you to use the keyboard in landscape mode.
6. The keyboard sucks. It gets slightly better after the iphone “learns” you, as the employees said, but even then, it’s not a device you can use with one hand comfortably, much less without looking.
And so on. Interesting that some of these are usability and interface issues. Experienced mobile users are accustomed to working with one hand and to tactile devices whereas the iPhone is very visual.
Anyway, the point is Apple managed to overcome rational critique and the “how” of that I think should be on every marketers mindd, and every sociologist’s too. So to Obama.
This is from the New York Daily News back in April 2008: “It seems like ancient history now, but not long ago Hillary Clinton argued that Barack Obama was getting a free pass from the media.”
It’s interesting because it comes well before the election. However, 8 months in and Obama’s style, rhetoric and capacity to change Washington are all pretty much subject to wider doubt than at any time when he was being hailed for his ability to connect to the voter.
This is from Newsweek in January 2009: “Luckily for Obama, the public still likes and trusts him, at least judging by the latest polls, including NEWSWEEK’s.But, in ways both large and small, what’s left of the American establishment is taking his measure and, with surprising swiftness, they are finding him lacking.”
And this from the yesterday’s London Times: “President Obama is ready to retreat from a central part of his domestic agenda in order to achieve some sort of healthcare reform this year, two of his senior aides indicated yesterday.”
All politicians get an easy ride at some stage but I wonder is Obama another case study in the uncritical nature of open communications on the Web. If so what can we do to fix the problem. The great part of conventional information dynamics is its responsiveness, in principle, to the dialectic of criticism.
[...] More on iPhone Coverage and….. Obama [...]
[...] been reviewing iPhone coverage here and here oh and here as well. “Many of my journalist peers are themselves obsessed about [...]