PCmag Hates the iPhone

PC Magazine has some serious iPhone hate going on.  On their current front page, there are 6 negative items about the iPhone:

Will the iPhone Be an iNightmare for Business?

The Anti-iPhone Solution

Cranky Geeks: iPhone: A Recipe for Failure?

Any Phone Can be an iPhone

Apple iPhone Exposed: How we secretly an obtained an iPhone, reviewed it all night, and found some serious flaws.

Apple iPhone Launch Reveals Phenomenon (in which John Dvorak makes fun of iPhone line-waiters)

There’s 1 neutral item (but this is just copied from Think Secret):

Inside Apple: Getting Inside the iPhone

Then there’s 1 positive item... about iPhone accessories:

10 Awesome iPhone Accessories

Then there’s this last item, which seems partially positive but is ultimately negative:

Apple iPhone: Fun, Fabulous, Flawed

This one contains all kinds of dumbness:

put simply, it isn’t a very good phone. Call quality was the worst we’ve heard on a high-end device in years

...and their testing apparently consists of just saying "it sounds teh suxorz."  Compare this with wirelessinfo.com’s review in which they actually perform tests on the audio, and then conclude things like "compares extremely well to other phones", "performance...was very good", and "overall, the sound quality is very acceptable".

It’s complicated to dial

...because it has the exact same dialpad that phones have had for decades?  Or because, since the iPhone is a multifunction device, you have to hit the "phone" button to put it into phone mode?  If that’s complicated, what the heck are you doing writing a review for a tech mag?

difficult to send text messages on

...despite the fact that just about every other review has praised its iChat-like text-messaging interface?

the iPhone Internet experience is loads of fun. It’s not quite "the Internet in your pocket," however. It displays HTML pages gorgeously (even over EDGE!)

...because the speed of the connection has ANYTHING to do with the aesthetics of how pages are displayed?

but the Internet is now loaded up with Javascript, Java, Flash, streaming media and other plug-ins. The iPhone can’t hit many of these rich experiences

Javascript isn’t a plug-in; every major browser supports it natively, including the iPhone’s browser.

The internet is hardly "loaded up" with Java; quite the contrary, Java is rarely seen nowadays on web pages, thankfully, since web-embedded Java applets were never anything but clunky and ugly.

Flash is the one item in this list that actually makes sense, but the most popular Flash destination on the internet is YouTube, and Apple convinced YouTube to convert their proprietary Flash content to standard H.264 video, specifically for iPhone and AppleTV.  Many internet users, including myself and apparently Apple, are fed up with the clunky non-native proprietary mess of plugins like Flash and Java that have plagued the web thus far, and the move to standard formats like H.264 can’t happen quickly enough.

Anyway... here are the 2 cell phone items from the front page of PCmag that aren’t about the iPhone:

Video Review: Hot Slim Phones

Sprint’s Most Powerful Smartphone

Quite a difference in tone there.

I never read PCmag; it just happened to come up as I was browsing news.google.com today.  So maybe it’s common knowledge that they are an anti-Apple publication (they are called "PC" Magazine after all).  But you’d think they’d at least pretend to try to hide such a glaring bias as this.

PS - here’s a screenshot of the hate-filled front page: