Apple’s iPhones are the top smart phones in our Ratings–actually, among the best of all phones we tested, period–but their exclusive carrier, AT&T, was middling at best in satisfaction…. If you’re readying to buy Apple’s phone, prepare for possible disappointment with its service and expect to love the phone anyway. Despite the network problems, a staggering 98 percent of iPhone users in our cell-phone-buying survey were satisfied enough to say they would definitely or probably buy the phone again.
Consumer Reports, quoted in this article on AllThingsDigital (oddly enough I don’t seem to be able to find the article on consumerreports.org yet, and yes I am a member)
Droid proponents like to claim that call quality on the Droid is better than on the iPhone (Dave Winer responding to this post by Stuart Alsop) and then generally say something like “who knows if it’s the phone or the network?” (ignoring the deluge of European iPhone users who will immediately respond that their iPhone call quality is Just Fine Thanks). For the record, it’s the network. Also for the record, Verizon and AT&T both suck, it’s just that Verizon sucks marginally less.
As for the iPhone, in the aforementioned Zealotry Sucks and So Does The iPhone, Winer says:
It’s a lovely piece of art, run by a platform vendor with a shitty idea of users and developers and serviced by a phone company that can’t run a cellular phone network.
Apparently there are a lot of “art” lovers out there. Maybe it’s Dave Winer who doesn’t have such a good idea of users. (I don’t think there are enough communications channels on the internets to contain all of Dave Winer’s opinions. How many blogs does he have? Pot, kettle, blah blah.)
Incidentally, Verizon is apparently spending north of $100,000,000 on advertising the Droid leading up to Christmas. I’ve seen the ads, and I don’t know whom these ads are targeted at, but it’s certainly not me. Sorry, I don’t want my phone to be a robot.