Hate to say it, but Jason Calacanis had it right: NYT gadget reviewer David Pogue's "iPhone: The Musical" was a trite, derivative, and boring piece of Apple propaganda. But a group of San Francisco webheads have come up with a pitch-perfect take on the iPhone phenomenon. Behold the glory that is "Dontcha Wish Your Cell Phone Was Hot Like Me?" — and after the jump, my take on why this spoof gets it right while Pogue's flopped.


Pogue attempts to pack the supposed evenhandedness of a gadget review into his song-and-dance routine, with tiresome results. And in the end, all you remember is the disgraceful spectacle of a Timesman bawling at the top of his lungs, "I want an iPhone!" Gee, David, we thought a call to Apple PR chief Katie Cotton would have scratched that itch a long time ago.

"Dontcha," by contrast, captures the most essential point about the iPhone: It turns its owners into monsters, imbuing them with a false sense of their own importance and sex appeal. The spectacle of geeks attempting to rap and perform dance hip-hop moves perfectly captures the inflated sense of self the iPhone lends. The video, directed by recent L.A. transplant Nora McDevitt, has a cast of microstars: Randi Jayne, the force behind "Valleyfreude" and sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; David Prager, COO of online-video startup Revision3; and Irina Slutsky of Geek Entertainment TV. (Jayne, Prager, and Slutsky also produced the video.) Jayne, in particular, shines, getting the Britney Spears wind-machine treatment as she disses the Sidekick, the Razr, and other cell phones that just aren't as hot. It almost — almost — made me want to buy one, something the endless Apple hype parade has yet to achieve.