At VMware's recent VMworld conference in Copenhagen, a colleague of Sneak's happened to notice that a fellow IT journalist was carrying two phone handsets; one was an iPhone, the other an old-fashioned looking Nokia.

It turns out that the iPhone is so bad for making voice calls that the guy decided to keep his Nokia for this purpose, presumably holding on to his iPhone for other stuff such as music, emails and running apps.

With all the bad publicity that Apple got over poor signal quality after the launch of the iPhone 4 last year, this set Sneak wondering if it is a widespread phenomenon.

We have all heard people complain that their iPhone has terrible reception, or it cuts out in the middle of calls, or that it has to be recharged every single day, or some other flaw.

With all this going on, how come the iPhone is still one of the bestselling handsets on the market? Is it possible that people don't generally use their iPhone to make voice calls, but instead use it as a kind of glorified iPod touch while making calls from an old Nokia, like that journalist does?

If this is the case, then it is quite ironic. The whole reason the smartphone evolved in the first place was supposedly because people were tired of lumping multiple digital devices around with them, and wanted one device capable of doing everything.

In other words, Apple hasn't built the most successful smartphone in the world. Instead, it appears to have reinvented the PDA.

21 Oct 2011