Buzz is a fickle thing. It can carry you away on waves of anticipation, promising the fulfillment of all your dreams. But buzz can turn on your just as easily. Nothing can be as good as pre-launch hysteria will make it out to be, and when that new device we’ve been waiting for with such yearning doesn’t turn out to be the cure for all the world’s ills, it can get ugly.

Apple is very familiar with the changeable nature of buzz. Anyone remember the Newton? I do. I wrote two books about it. (No really, two books.) I’m sure somewhere in Apple’s collective hind brain lurks that traumatic memory. Just as I’m sure more than a couple of Apple execs enjoyed some truly epic night terrors on the lead-up to the iPhone launch, probably involving iPhones morphing into Newtons on the store shelves and angry mobs of disappointed consumers hurling globs of egg freckles at Apple’s corporate headquarters.

The similarities between the iPhone and Newton are many – mobile device, new interface, new input methodology that requires some getting used to, and lots and lots of pre-launch buzz. As noted above, living up to buzz is a nearly impossible task. And disappointing people’s self-generated fantasies about your products can get ugly, really, really fast.

Apple is a much smarter, much more mature company than it was 15 years ago, and knows how to play the buzz like a virtuoso. And in that time most users have learned to embrace the principal of Caveat Emptor when it comes to “revolutionary” new technologies. Yes, they still get sucked into the buzz, but they’re less likely to be surprised, and as a result get less angry, when something doesn’t live up to the hype.

I bring all this up by way of an introduction to this series of iPhone reports. In looking at doing a review of the iPhone, I realized one review wasn’t going to cut it. The iPhone is such an innovative product that it demands an innovative approach to evaluating it. So, instead of one monolithic essay, I will break down our observations into reports. The best way to separate the buzz from reality is one step at a time.

So join us as we deconstruct the iPhone, and hopefully sort out the hype from reality. That way, should you decide in invest in an iPhone, at least you’ll know what you’re getting and way.

And, hopefully, you won’t be tempted to throw any egg freckles Apple’s way.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 10:43 am and is filed under HOME, TECH, CELL PHONES, IPHONE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.