How Apple Kept the iPhone Secret

An anonymous reader writes "Bogus prototypes, bullying the press, stifling pillow talk — all to keep iPhone under wraps. Fortune's Peter Lewis goes inside one of the year's biggest tech launches. One of the most astonishing things about the new Apple iPhone, introduced yesterday by Steve Jobs at the annual Macworld trade show, is how Apple managed to keep it a secret for nearly two-and-a-half years of development while working with partners like Cingular, Yahoo and Google."

Comments

you have no idea if it'll rock or suck

[SuperBanana]

After checking the feature set on Apple's web site, mark me down for at least two of those things.

You want it because all you saw was what Apple wanted you to see. You have no idea how it'll actually perform as a phone in ways that matter. I don't care how sexy it animates the UI if it's a shitty phone.

All the fervor is akin to GM showing off a new sexy looking car, and people wanting it, having no idea if it'll actually be a good car or not.

• How is reception/signal strength- cellular, Wifi, and Bluetooth?
• Does it drop calls mysteriously? (lot of early smartphones did)
• Does it explode in shards of expensive bits when dropped on the ground? (treos are famously fragile. Newtons were very tough. Will this be a Treo, or a Newton?)
• How clueful will Cingular be in sales and tech support?
• Will voicemails in the new "random access voicemail" system get deleted/disappear?
• How does the touchscreen feel? Is it a real problem having no actual buttons for tactile use of the phone (say, when driving?)
• Is the speakerphone loud enough/clear?
• Is the touchscreen durable?
• How well does it load pages over EDGE, which by all accounts is high-latency, slow, and already outdated? (I guarantee anything Steve did was over Wifi.)
• Will it support 802.11N so that it doesn't knock an N network down to G wherever it goes? It'd be pretty stupid to have an N network if your iPhone on your desk knocks you down to G.

You won't know any of this until Apple gives units to users (or maybe SOME journalists who aren't too distracted by "OOOO, NEW SHINY APPLE TOY". You're an absolute fool if you "pre-order" this thing.