That's what John C. Dvorak claims in his podcast, anyway. Citing an internal Cingular product tester, the iPhone only provides for 40 minutes of talk time and the interface crashes all the time. I taste some sour apples here.Just a week after Dvorak bashed Apple and said it should write the iPhone off as a proof-of-design project, he's at it again. This time he says an internal mole at Cingular provided him with secret information about the usability of Apple's forthcoming venture into new technology.

In Dvorak's podcast, he said "a guy at Cingular who's testing the product" gave him the skinny. According to the questionable source, the iPhone's battery is not removable, talk time lasts a mere 40 minutes and the user interface makes mistakes all the time. What those mistakes are remain a mystery.

The validity of this information is flimsy at best. I, for one, can't believe that Apple wouldn't have its UI ducks mostly in a row a mere 2 months before launch. The battery issue is slightly more believable, though who knows if the production battery was actually supplied to the tester.

Either way, I fear rumors from fanboys and Apple haters alike will continue to mount and swirl around the closer we get to the launch date.