Expected More
I'm sure anyone who's passionate about Apple and its products has heard of this guy. He has a habit of posting links to malinformed reports about Apple products and labeling them a "Jackass of the week." Most of the time, these people are probably simply misinformed, but it is a bit "jackassy" to write about something on a popular website without doing research first. Then of course there are the purposeful jackasses who know they're wrong but write silly things to drudge up traffic.
I was a bit surprised to see him embark on the same malinformed reporting today when he provided a link in his linked list to this review of using the M8 in Iraq. Now, there's some good points in this review, like the on/off switch that flips into self-timer way too easily ... but a lot of it is a bit of misinformation.
A lot of the issues, like the white balance and some of the noise issues have been corrected with firmware months ago. And this user obviously hasn't upgraded. It'd be like me complaining about a bug in OS X 10.5 that Apple fixed in 10.5.3 and writing a bad review of my MacBook Pro because of that bug. Make any sense? No.
John also goes out of his way to note the low-light performance that the reviewer mentioned. Well, yes, for f/4 its not that great. Go figure! But contrary to his review, there is good fast wide-angle glass available, including a 9.8mm f/1.8. The M8 has great low light performance and has some of the most fabulous low-light lenses available for use on it, including the famed Noctilux and most everything from the Summilux line.
I love my M8 as much as I love my Apple products. Yes, there are a few things that could be done much better, just as there are things Apple could improve on. But to base anything of the M8 off of this review is, well, silly. There's also some great reviews of the M8 from photojournalists overseas.
Anyway, to my knowledge this is the first piece on the M8 that Gruber has linked to from his blog, and for it to be such a misinformed negative review ... well it reminds me of those pro-bloggers who post negative a review about the iPhone despite never having used it and claim things like "it can't make phone calls."
Update: He posted one of the positive reviews I liked to today. Yeay for balanced journalism.