“Critical Mass: Everyone listens to Walt Mossberg”

“When we sat down and decided who are we going to show this to first, I said, ‘It’s got to go to Walt, because we’ve got to hear the truth,’ ” Mermelstein said as the meeting began.

“Remember, though, I’m not a consultant,” Mossberg replied.

“I think what you’re going to see is probably the most exciting out-of-the-box experience of any phone that we have released,” Titus said, handing Mossberg a thin black device with two fronts: a phone on one side, with a small screen, and a music player on the other. Mermelstein described its features.

“How much memory for music?” Mossberg asked.

Titus said, “It will come with a sixty-four-megabyte card.”

“That’s trivially small.”

“It is,” Titus said, adding, “And it’s consistent with our larger up-sell opportunities”—that is, opportunities to buy related products and accessories.

“That may be consistent with your ‘up-sell opportunities,’ ” Mossberg said, “but if I buy an iPod it’s got a ton of memory inside it. I can hardly fit any music on this.” The iPod Nano has two gigabytes—approximately sixty times the music memory of this device.

“That’s a very fair criticism,” Mermelstein said, adding that customers could buy an extra two-gigabyte memory card for forty dollars. “What’s the battery life?” Mossberg asked.

“Two and a half hours of talk time on the phone.”

“That’s low.”

“It’s about average for something that thin.”

“And how about for playing music?” Mossberg asked.

“About seven hours,” Titus said.

“That’s low,” Mossberg said. (The iPod Nano gets up to twenty-four hours.)

“There’s some other out-of-the-box advantages,” she continued, and pulled out a pack to expand battery life—a seventy-dollar value. But Mossberg was skeptical. “It seems to me you had to do this because the battery is weak,” he said.

He held up the Samsung and said, “I’m treating this as a real music player, so I have to compare it to an iPod.” Then he added that the phone seemed to be “a crippled music player.”

“This is a phone first, with a dynamic music capacity,” Mermelstein said.

“But the iPhone promises to be both,” Mossberg said. And while the Sprint Samsung—called the UpStage—was smaller and cheaper, at a hundred and forty-nine dollars, it costs ninety-nine cents to download a song from Apple, and Sprint was charging two ninety-nine.

“We will be able to offer a comparable price before the end of the year,” Mermelstein said.

“It’s really too bad you can’t do the ninety-nine cents at the same time you introduce the UpStage,” Mossberg said.

I wondered why these visitors hoped for a Mossberg endorsement. He has called the telephone companies “the new Soviet Ministries,” because of their insistence on controlling their customers, and he has written disparagingly about many of their products. (When, last August, a music phone called the Chocolate was introduced by Verizon, Mossberg informed readers that it was “burdened by a ham-handed user interface and other failings that would get its designers fired at Apple.”) And why were P.R. people rather than product designers making the pitch?

. . .

And when Mossberg has a meeting in his office companies try to solicit his opinion. Donna Dubinsky, who pitched both the Palm Pilot and the Treo to Mossberg, is now the C.E.O. of Numenta, Inc., which is developing software modelled on human thinking. “We want his input earlier,” she said, explaining that long before a product is ready for testing her company says to Mossberg, “ ‘Hey, give us your feedback.’ He almost plays an internal consulting role.” She added, “We view it more as a collaborative relationship.” She paused, as if realizing that this might embarrass Mossberg, and went on to say that he is not an adviser, and that he always stresses his freedom to criticize. Such background briefings are common and useful, Mossberg says, because they “help me know whether something is new by knowing what others are doing.”