Some guy at England’s finest newspaper, the Daily Mail, gives the iPhone a bad review. See here. Money quote: “Does it live up to the hype? As a phone, the answer is ‘no’.”

One thing you need to know about the way the British press covers Silicon Valley, and I mean even the quasi respectable ones like the Financial Times, is this: Most of these guys aren’t here in California. Many of them have never been here, in fact. They only come to the States when companies pay to fly them in and put them up, which we refuse to do, because they just spend the entire time getting drunk and stuffing their pockets with free jumbo shrimp from party buffets and hitting up the poor slobs in the U.S. press corps for info, which they then steal and put into the stories they file back to the home office. Honestly. They do no reporting. Unless you count talking to other reporters as “reporting.” And that’s if they’re diligent. The really lazy ones (and that’s most of them) just make their stuff up out of whole cloth. Take, for example, the guy who wrote the piece in the Daily Hate Mail. Rob Waugh. Has he seen an iPhone? No. Does “Rob Waugh” even exist? Nobody here has ever heard of him. For all we know it’s just a made-up character with a name that’s a sly reference to Evelyn Waugh, like maybe she was his grandmother or something. Geddit?

As far as I know the only British publication that actually stations someone in Silicon Valley is The Economist. And even those guys just get their stories by clipping articles from daily papers and changing the spelling to British style. Ever see an actual quote from an actual person in a story in The Economist? Once in a while, maybe. But not usually. You know that big cover story they just did on Apple? We never heard a word from them when they were putting it together.

Much love and namaste to Daily Mail reader Maggie Blackamoor for sending us the link. Keen eye, Maggie! Sorry to hear about your stomach troubles. But you’re in good hands with Dr. Singh and Dr. Parikh. You’ll be up and about in no time.