WTF? Ex-Apple Executive Apologizes For The Original iPhone, Says It “Wasn’t Great”

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iphone2g

Here’s a hard to believe story: one of Apple’s executives behind the original iPhone has gone so far as to apologize to anyone who bought one during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.

Why? According to ex-Apple senior director of product marketing for the original iPhone Bob Borchers: “If you had the original iPhone, I apologize; it was not a great phone, it was an OK phone.”

Unbelievably, he may have a point.

Borchers has since moved on from Apple, and is now Dolby’s Chief Marketing Officer. Although obviously the original iPhone 2G changed the mobile landscape forever, he thinks that Apple made mistakes putting together and marketing the original iPhone.

How? Specifically, when Apple said that the iPhone was a revolutionary phone, the best iPod ever and the Internet in your pocket, it had the order the wrong way around.

“What was interesting at Apple is that technology took a back seat to user interface. If you look at the iPhone as a technological element everything had been done before, it was about bringing all that together into an experience that was compelling and then communicating it as an experience not as a technology”.

“There were three value propositions in order of importance: a revolutionary phone, the best iPod ever and the Internet in your pocket but in fact it should have been the reverse. Having the Internet in your pocket was the most important.”

Borcher has a point. The original iPhone shipped with only an EDGE mobile connection, and couldn’t even natively run apps. It wasn’t until the iPhone 3G that the iPhone’s “connection to the Internet and the app community” helped make the iPhone the device it is today.

Source: Trusted Reviews

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