The old obsolescence adage once reserved for the auto industry is truer for tech products than it ever was for cars. For today’s high-tech products, obsolescence comes not from price value drop between the showroom floor and once driven off the lot. Today a product gets labeled obsolete through web chatter. New products, even ones with obvious advantages, can find the consumer marketplace an unfriendly place for sales because of blogging and website reviews.

 

Weeks before he died, iconic founder Steve Jobs introduced with much fanfare Apple's latest version of the iPhone® , the product that revolutionized mobile communication.  Almost before the applause from Apple devotees’ died down, tech product reviewers had taken the product through its paces and pronounced it “nothing special”.   Apple's new iPhone4G was not the giant technological leap forward that had defined earlier versions in their view.  Not that it was a bad product, but the ultra-high expectations of the blogging community had not been met, and bloggers’ disappointment reverberated across the globe immediately at 4G speed.

 

Sales of the newest iPhone have been good, with pre-ordering for the 4S topping 1 million on the first day you could reserve a phone.  But the blogosphere did not herald this newest Apple product as the Second Coming and so the buyer should be aware of potential caveats with its purchase.  With its introduction proceeded only by several weeks the death of Jobs, a man who  doubtlesswill go down in history as one of the greatest inventors of our generation, it was a particular let-down to techies that Job’s final product did not live up to his legacy as genius.

 

 

Manufacturers now take online product reviews very seriously. Some, like Research In Motion, the manufacturer of the smartphone Blackberry®, have scrapped several new updates because early indicators revealed the blogosphere wouldn’t go “ga-ga.”    Waiting for the big one, has caused RIM to lose significant market share.  Adding to RIMs troubles, was a global service outage this week that had many users frustrated over the Blackberry.  Going ga-ga over a tech product now means the difference between marketplace success and failure for a manufacturer.

 

Whenever a new product hits the market, reviews (both positive and negative) start to flood the internet and this greatly affects consumer attitude and reception of the product. Electronic gadgets like phones and tablets gain popularity largely owing to the kind of reviews they get when they debut. The slightest blip and everything may potentially come crashing down. There are websites that specialize in reviewing tech products and they have slowly become authorities on deciding which are the best and which aren’t worth the money.

 

Reviews are without a doubt important when you need to decide what products to buy. But it is also important to recognize that being an early purchaser of a tech product could backfire should that product have bad reviews. You as a consumer could be stuck with a product that the manufacturer no longer supports from the standpoint of repairs, parts or extended warranty.  

And as for the iPhone4S, it does have distinct advantages over the iPhone4.  It has a 8 megapixel HD camera instead of only a 5 pixel on the iPhone4.  It is thinner and has a 8 hour talk time, an hour more than the iPhone 4 and 3 more hours than the iPhone3.  It has a 1080p HD screen resolution, which is twice the screen resolution of the iPhone3, so it’s easier to read and view.  It is cloud-ready naturally so you have somewhere to park all those pictures you take with your phone and it has Siri, a talking personal assistant.  Naturally, it looks amazing and yet it still got negative reviews that may compromise its in-production life.  The tech world has already pinned its hopes on an iPhone5.  Buyers beware.

The iPhone4S costs $199 for a 16-gigabyte model and $299 for a 32 GB and $399 for 64GB.  The good news is that the iPhone3 can be had for only $99 now.