"Dialling by number is a novelty nowadays"
There are too many points in your post to make me think that you don't know what you're talking about. I'm going to list some of the things that I think you're horrendously wrong about:
- I'm used to the full QWERTY keyboard, so why suddenly switch to a three-characters-per-key keypad for a specific task?
Because it's faster if you're walking/driving/finger-poking/performing another one-handed activity. You can just T9 the first few letters of the contact's name and voila, it's almost as if you've dialled a four-digit number to get to your friend.
- Dialling by number is a novelty nowadays
Tremendously wrong here. Dialling by number can be faster than looking the person up in the address book if (like the article author) you have 300+ contacts in your address book.
Also, since you go on to say you "just want to talk", hiding the dialler is also a very bad idea.
- I don't understand how the Blackberry look up by contact is different to the iOS version?
With a Blackberry, if you are at the home screen, you just start typing the person's name or start dialling the number you want to dial. E.g. if you type in "andr" it will show you Andrew Smith and James Andrews, and you just finger-poke the contact to then perform an operation (dial, text, bbm, etc).
- Until any smart phone has an SLR-like instant-on camera, they should all be scored low. The delay is just inexcusable.
It's almost as if you are comparing a CAMERA to a PHONE. Weird. And I'm sure the purpose of this article is to compare a PHONE with a PHONE.
- Likewise, all should get low scores for their walled gardens.
You mean as in SMS? The world we live in has many, many different messaging protocols. The article is, again, comparing the out-of-the-box experience of handsets. All of which at a very basic level support SMS, MMS and Email - none of which (AFAIK) are "walled-garden" protocols.
- Flash is subjective
Ah! You're an iPhone user. Suddenly your obsession with impossibly high standards, not seeing the point of otherwise useful features, and irritation with walled gardens all becomes clear...