Apple Announces The iPhone
Apple has finally announced the iPhone a product to have been rumoured for a while, but yesterday the iPhone became a reality as Steve Jobs announced its release at MacWorld 2007. Apple continues to work its magic. The iPhone combines a cool phone, an iPod with touch controls, web browsing, maps, and email into one package.
And of course - it doesn’t get any sleeker. This definitely has the Apple feel to it.
The iPhone uses a totally new interface using touch which allow the user to control the interface with their fingers. The iPhone can make calls if you simply point at the the number. Your contact list is synced from your PC, Mac, so that you can begin with all your contacts stored instantly. On top of that you can create custom lists and combine phone calls to create conference calls.
iPhone also has a Visual Voicemail feature. This allows the user to visualize the contents of the voicemail and then choose which one to play, instead of being forced to listen to the voice mails in order.
Text messaging in the iPhone is also very simple to do. Forget using tiny buttons, Apple has creatively thought of displaying a virtual keyboard on the screen. Simply touch the “buttons” to create the message you want. This feature also displays predictive text.
Along with that the iPhone includes a 2 megapixel camera, a photo syncing system (with PC or Mac) and a photo browsing features.
As mentioned before the phone contains a 3.5-inch widescreen display. Users can scroll through music lists, play, pause all with the flick of a finger. You can now for the first time scroll through music by album art, this is done by flipping the iPhone into the landscape when in that mode.
Using a WiFi connection the iPhone contains a full Safari browser, which allows viewers to look at websites just the way they would on their computer (packed with images). It also allows you to zoom in and out in the case that anything becomes unclear. On top of that you can easily search in Google or Yahoo! in just the same way as if you were at your computer.
The iPhone supports a wide variety of Email services like Google Mail, Yahoo Mail and so on.
Maps are easily viewed on the phone using Google’s famous service. It allows for you to view maps,satellite images, traffic information, and direction infromation all through touch.
The iPhone also contains sensors to help with comfort and extend the gadget’s battery life. The accelerometer knows when the user has switched the iPod from potrait to landscape and adjusts the display while keeping the images produced crisp.
There is also a proximity sensor which is able to detect if you have the phone to your ear, at which point it turns off so that the touch doesn’t do something that you didn’t intend. Another sensor detects how much lighting there is and adjusts the brightness of the display accordingly.
The 4GB model will cost $499 and the 8GB mode $599 (US). The iPhone will be available in the US in June 2007, Europe in late 2007, and Asia in 2008. Even though it has taken Apple a while to finally come out with the iPhone, it does look spectacular and it seems that they have produced another status symbol.
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