Gizmodo
Nick Douglas |
Huffington Post |
Posted Tuesday January 9, 2007 at 01:40 PM
Ladies and gentlemen, Apple went and did it. This morning (in fact it's still going on) Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, the new full-touchscreen iPod with a built-in phone.
According to tech blogs Gizmodo and TUAW, the device runs Apple's operating system, OS X, comes with a camera, takes a SIM card for GSM service, and has an accelerometer to tell when to display portrait or landscape orientation or to dim while it's used as a phone. The screen is 3.5".
Here's why this is such an important announcement:
- Mac followers have rumored an iPhone for years, as desired but elusive as peace in the Middle East. Apple just needed time to plan the perfect device.
- This will be the slickest smart phone on the market. It blows away the Blackberry and Treo.
- In fact, Jobs just announced that it uses Wifi. That's a huge deal, as users can zip through e-mail and the web at "real" Internet speeds. This phone can actually replace a laptop for the typical out-of-office worker.
Jobs is still onstage as of publication, so some details about the service aren't yet clear, but it sounds like this phone is unlocked — potentially usable with any carrier — so Update: It's locked into Cingular for now, but it could set a standard even more ubiquitous than the Blackberry.- Look ma, no stylus! The iPhone uses multitouch input, meaning that a user can use several fingers at once. It's like a tiny version of Tom Cruise's computer in Minority Report.
- It just killed Microsoft's last hope of entering the portable media-player market. Apple used perfect competitive timing, launching this just a couple months after Microsoft's disappointing Zune player.
- It's also a huge blow to Microsoft's vision. MS founder Bill Gates wrote in The Road Ahead, his visionary 1995 book, about the wallet PC. This would be a pocket-sized device with Internet and smart-card capabilities. Users could use it to squirt payments, talk on the phone, or surf online. Zoom forward twelve years and Microsoft is squirting songs on a media player while Apple is releasing Gates's wallet PC. History will remember three products that brought Apple back and hastened the end of Microsoft: The iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone.
For more details, see:
TUAW Macworld keynote liveblog
Twitter Macworld feed
Gizmodo Macworld 2007 coverage
