MacWorld 2007: Apple iPhone
Apple today at MacWorld unveiled their latest take the world by storm device. The new iPhone will be available in June in a 4GB model for $499 and an 8GB model for $599 and will run off of the Cingular cellular phone network.
The Apple iPhone, which runs off of Mac OS X, is being touted by its maker as a device which combines "a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, searching and maps-into one small and lightweight handheld device".
The iPhone is indeed a device that seems to be in a class by itself, using built-in sensors to do things like observing that a user has rotated the device from portrait to landscape, then automatically changing the contents of the display accordingly, with users immediately seeing the entire width of a web page, for example. This built-in sensor feature also detects when you lift iPhone to your ear and immediately turns off the display to save power and prevent inadvertent touches. This is on top of a built-in ambient light sensor automatically adjusting the display's brightness to the appropriate level for the current ambient light.
As for controls, the iPhone sports a multi-touch display. This display basically lets you control all functions with your fingers. The iPhone is also relatively thin, measuring 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46 inches. Battery life is reported to be up to five hours for talk time/Web browsing/video watching and up to 16 hours for audio playback.
Here is a further breakdown of features based on the three different directions the iPhone takes:
- Mobile Phone:
- Allows users to make calls by simply pointing at a name or number.
- Syncs all of your contacts from your PC, Mac or Internet service such as Yahoo!
- Construct a favorites list for your most frequently made calls.
- Merge calls together to create conference calls.
- Visual Voicemail lets users look at a listing of their voicemails, decide which messages to listen to, then go directly to those messages without listening to the prior messages.
- A SMS application with a full QWERTY virtual keyboard with predictive text to send and receive SMS messages in multiple sessions.
- A calendar application that allows calendars to be automatically synced with your PC or Mac.
- A 2 megapixel camera and a photo management application. Users can browse browse their photo library, which can be synced from their PC or Mac, and choose a photo for their wallpaper or to include in an email.
- A quad-band GSM phone which also features EDGE and Wi-Fi wireless technologies (802.11b/g) for data networking as well as Bluetooth 2.0 EDR.
- Widescreen iPod:
- Touch controls that lets music lovers scroll through entire lists of songs, artists, albums and playlist.
- Cover Flow, which lets you browse your music library by album cover artwork. When navigating your music library on iPhone, you are automatically switched into Cover Flow by rotating iPhone into its landscape position.
- A 3.5-inch widscreen display.
- Touch controls for play-pause, chapter forward-backward and volume when watching TV shows and movies.
- Syncs content from a user's iTunes library on their PC or Mac, and can play any music or video content they have purchased from the online iTunes store.
- Internet Communications Device:
- Features a HTML email client which fetches your email in the background from most POP3 or IMAP mail services and displays photos and graphics right along with the text. iPhone is fully multi-tasking, so you can be reading a web page while downloading your email in the background.
- Yahoo! Mail is offering a new free "push" IMAP email service to all iPhone users that automatically pushes new email to a user's iPhone, and can be set up by entering your Yahoo! name and password.
- iPhone will also work with most industry standard IMAP and POP based email services, such as Microsoft Exchange, Apple .Mac Mail, AOL Mail, Google Gmail and most ISP mail services.
- Runs a version of the Mac Safari web browser for viewing web pages and lets one zoom in to expand any section by tapping on iPhone's multi-touch display with their finger. Also includes built-in Google Search and Yahoo! Search, automatic syncing of bookmarks from a PC or Mac.
- Support for wireless Internet usage via Wi-Fi or EDGE.
- Built-in Google Maps, featuring Google's online maps service and iPhone's maps application, lets users view maps, satellite images, traffic information and get directions.