New toy rocks markets
Jim Jamieson
Province
Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs created a frenzy among Mac-heads and other technophiles yesterday by introducing its long-awaited iPhone.
A morphing of Apple’s iconic iPod media player and a cellphone, the iPhone is controlled by touch, plays music, takes digital photos, surfs the Internet and runs the Macintosh computer operating system.
Jobs, in his annual address at the Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco, predicted the iPhone will “reinvent” the telecommunications sector and “leapfrog” past the current generation of hard-to-use smart phones.
Signalling its increasing focus on consumer electronics, Jobs also renamed the company to Apple Inc.
The iPhone — which will retail with a two-year contract at $499 US for the four-gigabyte model and $599 for the eight-GB version — will launch in the U.S. in June through Cingular.
An Apple spokesman said there are no details yet for when the iPhone will be available in Canada.
The iPhone will compete for a share of the $127-billion world cellphone market against Motorola and Nokia, which are struggling to fuel sales of their own phones with music and Internet connections.
Jobs said Apple has a goal of gaining one per cent of the global market for mobile phones, or 10 million phones per year, by the end of 2008 — but most analysts thought that figure was low.
“The device looks cool, it’s thinner, has no buttons, so — just like the scroll wheel became the defining element of the iPod — it looks like a great idea,” said Simon Fraser University professor of communication Richard Smith, whose lecture yesterday morning was interrupted when news of the iPhone sparked an impromptu discussion.
“There have been all kinds of attempts to get more real estate on a phone, with sliders and hinges, but here you have buttons and screen in one interface.”
Smith predicted Apple’s design strengths and the iPhone’s ability to automatically synch with users’ computers will make it a formidable competitor.
“This is where the iPod just cleaned up, it was so tightly integrated with iTunes,” said Smith. “Now every iPod connector is a charger for your phone.”
The phone automatically synchs movies, music, photos through Apple’s ITunes Music Store. The device also synchs e-mail content, web bookmarks and nearly any type of digital content stored on a computer.
The iPhone also threaten smartphone makers Research In Motion (BlackBerry) and Palm (Treo), whose stock prices yesterday dropped 7.9 per cent and 5.7 per cent, respectively.
Jobs also unveiled a TV set-top box that allows people to send video from their computers and announced the number of songs sold on its ITunes Music Store has topped two billion.
© The Vancouver Province 2007
