Apple stuns world with amazing new iPhone
By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
The world’s thinnest phone with widescreen video iPod, photo player, Internet browser, email device and much more has just been launched. It’s the gadget of the decade! Totally, utterly, jaw-droppingly amazing.
Steve Jobs has amazed the entire world with the brand new iPhone, a next-generation iPod that seamlessly merges a widescreen, wireless iPod, an amazing GSM/GPRS/EDGE mobile phone (although not 3G), built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and full web browsing, email and other software programs (widgets) to deliver the next-generation mobile Internet, music, video, photo and computing experience.
Apple’s PDA phone makes the original Newton look very basic indeed, as it uses no stylus but is fully touch controlled. It also runs Mac OS X, although there’s no word on whether or not you could run Photoshop or other OS X apps on the phone, and at this stage it doesn’t look like that’s what the iPhone can do.
Music can be viewed with the CoverFlow graphical movement of album covers across the screen as seen in iTunes 7. Integration with Google Maps is built-in, as is free Yahoo push email (like Blackberries can do) using IMAP to ensure you’re notified of new emails virtually immediately. The touch screen keyboard looks like a winner, too – with only one physical button on the iPhone, everything else is touch screen, on an LCD screen of 3.5-inches that has incredibly sharp resolution.
Apple have also changed their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to just Apple, Inc in celebration of the fact that they are well and truly no longer a computer company.
Cingular are indeed the network partner for Apple, and the head of Cingular, who pointed out that Cingular is now a part of AT&T, was at pains to explain that this was not a MVNO relationship, but one that let Apple be Apple, and Cingular be Cingular.
Apple are using some advanced features of Cingular’s network to allow users to listen to voicemail messages in whatever order they choose, not the order they were recorded in.
Other features include one of the smallest Bluetooth headsets you ever seen, plus a standard pair of headphones that now comes with a small microphone section if you prefer to use a wired headset, as the Bluetooth headset is likely to be an extra-cost option.
The iPhone comes in a 4Gb version for US $499, while an 8Gb version will retail at US $599. Delivery for the US is June, as the phone is still awaiting FCC approval. Europe will see the iPhone in the fourth quarter while Asia will get it in 2008. Presumably this means Australia, being in the ‘Asian’ region, won’t see the iPhone until 2008, either.
Steve Jobs did start off by explaining that the iTV is now the Apple TV, with Wi-Fi b/g/n, 40Gb of internal storage, and could stream videos, photos and music from up to 5 PCs or Macs in your house, with a very slick interface very similar to what Steve Jobs previewed last September when he first showed off iTV. There was no mention of a 12-inch MacBook, or a Mac Tablet. No talk of an 8-core Mac Pro, even though Intel launched an 8-core solution at CES. No Black iMac computers as someone suggested to me yesterday might appear. No demonstrations of Mac OS X 10.5. No word on how Apple came to a deal with Linksys and Cisco to use the iPhone name. And no ‘one more thing’ at the end, either.
But in the end, it didn’t matter. The Apple TV and especially the iPhone simply blew us all away. Competitors ‘smartphones’ don’t look anywhere near as smart as they did yesterday. The iPhone’s touch screen interface looks to be tremendously simple to use, with the iPhone truly taking the mobile everything experience to the next level.
Apple have done it! See for yourself at www.apple.com/iphone, where you’ll also find a link to watch the keynote using Apple’s free Quicktime video player. It’s only the 9th of January as we type in the US, but already, we can confidently say that the iPhone is not only the gadget of the year or the decade, but so far, it is THE gadget of the 21st century!
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January 9th, 2007
this phone is like nothing i have ever seen before….the phone is truly flawless. though it lacks 3G it has everything else you could possibly ask for in a phone, i mean 3G is nice but lets not get greedy.