As expected, its a perfect blend of an iPod and a phone, with loads of other features tossed in for good measure.
The nitty, as well as the gritty
So whats this hot little number packing? Oh, just a 3.5-inch multi-touch wide -screen! That means you can touch two places at once, and it recognizes them. That’s something completely new in the mobile device arena. But don’t worry, the proximity sensor will shut off the key bad when you have the phone close to your ear, so your cheek doesn’t decide to get click-happy while you’re on a call. Touchiness aside, you can now also watch wide-screen videos on an actual wide-screen… Wide, thats a funny word. Say it out loud with me, “WIDE”. Funny, huh? Anyway…
It still plays music and audio books as well, but there is oh so much more.
First off, lets get some specs out of the way:
- 11.6 mm’s thin (damn!)
- 3.5-inch multi-touch wide-screen
- 480 x 320 resolution, 160 ppi
- Quad-band GSM (850, 900, 1800, 1900)
- 135 grams
- 5 hrs battery life for talking/video, 16 hrs for music
- Cingular exclusive prices of $499 for 4GB (ouch! but MANY will fork out for it) for a 2 year contract, and $599 for 8GB
- Ships this June in the US, Europe this Fall
For the Talkers and Texters
Just like the name would lead all English speaking humanoids to conclude, its a phone. As such, its got a dialpad(via touch-display), call logs, and an address book (that syncs with your computer), but it also has easy to use conference calling (my Razr isn’t exactly intuitive in this department), and stores your voicemails so you can listen to them whenever and visually navigate through them like email. No more listening to your first 6 messages Bob sent you to get to the 7th one from your wife. On the negative, there is no built in VoIp support, which I suppose is to be expected since Cingular would rather you use their minutes on this phone, but it would be nice to have the VoIp option when in a wireless hotspot. Perhaps Gizmo Project will run on it, but that remains to be seen.
For SMS the iPhone has a soft-keyboard with predictive entry and auto-correct, with an iChat style interface that always makes me drool. With this style of display you can easily see which conversation you were in, just like what gmail did for multi-reply email.
Ahem… Camera?
Of course, being a modern cellular phone, it must have a camera… probably one of those dinky 640X480 ones that everyone loves to use, right? Nopers. You know Apple never does anything half-assed, and as such the iPhone has a big-ole 2 Megapixel camera. One oversight is that its a fixed-focus camera, which somewhat reduces the grandure of it all. I would think Apple would see this as a big downside. Also, the camera is on the back, which makes sense for taking photos with the viewfinder, but cuts out any hope of video chat/calling, something that could have really be a deal-maker for this device.
The photo management system that kicks the crap out your regular cell phone’s list-o-pictures. On the iPhone you get a thumbnail grid of photos. Select a photo to view it full-screen, and drag your finger horizontally to go to the next or previous photo. Grab a place on the photo with your thumbs and drag toward the edges of the screen to get a Minority-report-like zoom on that portion of the photo. You have to watch the QuickTour to see just how rad that looks (select the “Photos” tour on the right of that page).
You call that a smart phone?
Like your Daddy’s 4lb brick of a “smart phone”, the iPhone has web and email. Apple does it up proper with a rich HTML email client and a portable version of Safari, accessing the web with either Wi-Fi or EDGE (Its got Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR as well, of course, though I don’t know how integrated it is with things like iTunes and the photo app). It automatically syncs your email as well as bookmarks from your computer, and it’s fast enough to surf the net while downloading your email in the background. You can view websites either portrait or landscape, and can zoom as well. So i guess its more like an iPod blended with a phone and a Nokia 770 (though my 770 blows it away in resolution :p ) As for the email client, it is both intuitive and much easier on the eyes than a regular cell phone. It has a large enough screen to read text and view inline photos without strain.
The iPhone also comes with its own map viewing software that downloads maps, satellite photos, and points of interest from Google Maps. Its not GPS, so you have to know where you are, but it’ll definitely help you get to any destination.
Did I forget to mention it runs OS X? Oh, well it does… somehow. This gives it the ability to, among other things, run widgets. To you non Mac/Konfabulator… er Yahoo Widget Engine users, widgets are little applications that provide useful tasks like the stock widget that tracks your favorite stocks, or the weather widget that, well, tells you the weather of course! Calculators, notes, clocks, timers, RSS readers, and nearly anything else you could ask for are available in the form of widgets. No word yet on how whether all OS X widgets will run on this or not, and more importantly, we don’t yet know what 3rd party application support there is. It may not be open to anything but widgets, or it may run ported versions of OS X apps, or it may have a full SDK waiting to be unveiled. Nobody knows at this point.
And so faithful readers, thats all we know for now about the new Apple iPhone. I’m super excited about this thing, though I won’t be getting one any time soon, nor do I need one at the moment. Its got some really innovative new features, and a few downsides as well as a dash of question marks. However, as this slick gadget has been the subject of endless speculation, you can bet your copy of The Economics of Industry that many will pay any price asked by Jobs for this little gem. Oh, and be sure to go to the iPhone Website for QuickTours of all the features packed into the iPhone.
Update: Gizmodo has a ton of photos of the iPhone on display, and more at apple insider
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