Gone is the keyboard; just touch the 3.5-inch screen
Murray Hill
Sun
Apple CEO Steve Jobs describes iPhone as being five years ahead of other cellphones. Photograph by : Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO – Apple CEO Steve Jobs heard something familiar Tuesday at the Macworld Conference and Expo — a loud buzz from delegates who had just heard him describe the long-anticipated iPhone.
iPhone can take multiple calls and set up conferences, take photos through the two-megapixel onboard camera and send them in seconds. Voicemail is standard and users have the capacity to selectively listen to voicemail in whatever order they wish — avoiding wading through the mass of messages of a standard voicemail system.
It has no keyboard, just a 3.5-inch screen. The slim device fits in the palm of your hand with a glass face and a chrome back. It has no buttons other than volume, wake and sleep controls.
“iPhone is revolutionary and magical,” Jobs said. “We are all born with the ultimate pointing device — our fingers — and iPhone uses them to create the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse.”
Jobs described it as five years ahead of other cellphones.
From the screen, consumers can load music, videos, movies, audio books, contact lists, calendars, phone numbers, browser favourites and more all on the same device.
“It’s the Internet in your pocket,” Jobs beamed.
Instead of the familiar scroll wheel iPod users like so much, users brush their fingers across the screen to navigate to a particular song or movie. A tap of a finger on the screen plays that song. Album art is displayed in beautiful colour and to see a wider view you turn the device from a portrait mode into landscape mode and it automatically rotates the image and enlarges it to fit the screen.
The iPhone is available only as a GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) phone on the Cingular network in the U.S. and won’t be available until June. Rollout in Canada and other countries will follow. It will come in 4GB and 8Gb versions that will retail for $499 and $599 US on a two-year contract.
As an Internet device, the iPhone supports Apple’s Safari web browser.
A partnership with Yahoo Mail offers free e-mail to purchasers with push technology so e-mail is delivered to the device without having to get it. Another partnership with Google involves having Google’s search engine onboard, including Google Maps.
Apple has registered more than 200 patents on the iPhone.
Jobs said he hopes to capture one per cent of the world’s cellphone market — about 10 million devices — with the iPhone. But the consensus among delegates was that goal was very low.
Also Tuesday, Jobs said Apple will begin taking orders immediately for the $299 US video box called Apple TV. It will ship next month. The gadget is designed to bridge computers and television sets so users can more easily watch their downloaded movies on a big screen. A prototype of the gadget was displayed by Jobs in September when Apple announced it would sell TV shows and movies through its iTunes online store.
Jobs also announced Tuesday that the company in being renamed to just “Apple Inc.” He said the name change is meant to reflect the fact that Apple has matured from a computer manufacturer to a full-fledged consumer electronics company.
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
