Apple Legend Woz Blasts iPhone Price Drop And Refund Policy

Even though he takes issue with the price cut and how it was handled, Wozniak said he is a big fan of the iPhone. "I fell in love with the iPhone," he said. "I did not like it at first." Wozniak said it took him a month to fall in love with the device. He said he also "loves the Blackberry Pearl because it is such a small size. The iPhone is bigger, but boy that iPhone is more fun even when it's slower at dialing phone calls."

Wozniak said he still has not switched the phone he primarily uses for voice over to the iPhone because of the "voice quality, being able to hear it." What's more, he said, the iPhone doesn't work with the BlueTooth (wireless hands free) technology he loves so much."I like to be hands free and my voice dialing is not built into the iPhone yet," he says. "I expect that soon."

Wozniak, however, had high praise for the iPhone's interface and the ability to use the phone like almost like a full fledged desktop to view the internet. "I like the human approach," he said of the iPhone. "If a Web page looks the same as on my computer, I don't have to learn a whole new familiarity. Every smart phone I used before the iPhone, if I used it for Web browsing I just got sick. I almost wanted to throw up. It was so miserable an experience. Sometimes I couldn't even find the field I wanted. It was horrible to navigate and I said, 'I am not going to use this!' Every one of them I put down. I said I am not going to switch to a Smart Phone so ridiculously inhuman. I think the iPhone has really got a lot of the right formulas: Make the Web page look the same. Why didn't anyone ever do that before?"

Wozniak said he is surprised it took so long for a company to develop a successful Smart Phone-like device to surf the internet. "Sony should have done it," he said. "They had the Clie long ago with the big screen and they just didn't find the right formula. In a lot of these cases, Apple has replaced Sony in making the best products that everyone wants."

Wozniak complained that a lot of the intense focus on user interface design even at Apple has gone away. "We have learned the formulas and a lot of that (innovative) thinking has gone away," he said. "Now we (at Apple) are a monopoloy as much as Microsoft. If you're going to buy a Macintosh you're going to buy a Macintosh and we don't need quality to sell."

Wozniak said some the work is shoddy and the lack of focus is evident in "confusing" design or inappropriate wording. At Apple in the early days, there was even a booklet for user interface guidelines that came from the early Macintosh. "We still prided ourselves on being easy to use and user interface," he said. "User interface means the software developer put a whole lot of extra software in to make it work the human way, the way the human will understand."

Wozniak said he is an avid consumer gadget user who usually has two phones on him and sometimes three or four."I keep up by buying them," he said. "I go through almost every significant cell phone or smart phone that comes out to try to get my own opinion. I can't judge it just based on what I read. Sometimes you have to really use it to see what works and what doesn't. What is cumbersome for people and what is not."

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