While sitting in Lufthansa’s First Class lounge at the Franz- Joseph-Strauss airport (Munich), which is undoubtedly one of, if not the best transit airport in the world, I was going through the latest issue of TIME magazine.
Personally, I grew up reading TIME, Newsweek and papers such as The Guardian, Telegraph and International Herald Tribune, with a subset of local papers, whatever country of my residence was. And these papers inspired me to become a journalist, as I learned the importance of right information at the right time. But most importantly, information had to be truthful, regardless of subjective views of local authorities – and wherever you liked it or not.
Largest cell-phone retailer in the world... really?
Thus, it makes me feel sad that TIME has put for a marketing lie for a fact, and positioned it in its numbers section on page 12: “13 Million – Number of iPhones sold since their debut – making Apple the third largest cell-phone retailer in the world”.
Excuse me?
While I have nothing against Apple Computer Inc., I will call BS when I see one. The market numbers may be true for United States, or for North America, but stating something like this is just… well, beyond belief. 13 million phones are large, yet a small change in the world that measures more than one billion cellphones sold every year.
Apple is gaining tremendously, but the company is selling less cellphones than companies such as Nokia, leader with 112 million sold iPhone-competing (Smartphone) and 400 million overall phones, Samsung, RIM, Sony Ericsson, LG and of course, hot-growing HTC.
Apple iPhone offers a lot of things and nobody can deny that the product features best user interface for surfing, BUT – if you are as reputable source as TIME, Newsweek or similar publication, you cannot play with something that growing minority of your readers (future ex-readers?) will notice.
Sadly with this, my confidence in TIME is pretty much shaken, and it seems to me that “Old Media” is just unable to cut through the BS and these side-kick made-up unchecked stories are. Now I wonder how many TIME stories I did not had time to check, but yet took as a fact.
And for what? For 100 character comment that was so easy to check – just by typing “cellphone sales world” or “cellphone sales USA” in Google?
