During Episode 93 of the spodcast this Week in Tech (TWiT)Dvorak said he received information from "a guy at Cingular who's testing the product." The unnamed, male Cingular employee told Dvorak "there's lots of issues" with the iPhone.
Dvorak said that the iPhone was blighted with not having a removable battery, so "you run 20 minutes and you're using up half the battery power. You get 40 minutes total talk time. And the interface fouls up constantly."
The Cingular geezer or geezerette asked Dvorak not to tell anyone. OK it is a "man in the pub told me" style story, but it does not mean that there is no truth behind it. Certainly it is an odd thing to make up.
But the fan boys are up in arms about the comment and every where the story appears on the interweb there is a diatribe from at least three fanboys about how unreliable Dvorak is as a reporter.
One post said that Dvorak had a background in news and was therefore not qualified to write about technical stuff. Others sited a 1991 prediction he made that didn't come true.
One poster said that if Steve Jobs said that 40 minutes on the phone was long enough to speak to someone that must be OK and he would curtail his usage immediately. Another added that if people used their phones longer than 40 minutes there must be something wrong with them.
More here.