Your life in your pocket
Steve jobs is undeniably the most brilliant man in the computer industry. When he gave us the Mac he revolutionized the way we thing about computers. When he gave us the iPod, he revolutionized not only music but the way people broadcast. Now he's done it again but this time with the phone. In the beginning of his iPhone introduction he said his product was five years ahead of the competition. When I heard that I was skeptical. Now I think it was a drastic understatement. If he's only five years ahead it's because his competition will incorporate some of his ideas is their products. This phone has over 200 new patents. It's amazing.
The phone has 3 advanced sensors built in to improve user experience. The phone uses a proximity sensor to detect when the user's brought the phone to their ear so it can disable the controls and turns off the display. It has a ambient light sensor to automatically adjust brightness. It has an accelerometer so it can detect when the user holds the phone horizontally and automatically goes into landscape mode [00:13:00].
You control the phone using your finger not a stylus. There's no hardcoded keyboard. It's software driven so the interface can actually evolve after the hardware's been released. Text messaging is done using a GUI QWERTY keyboard for example. When you first pick up the phone you slide the unlock button across the screen start using it. It uses a technology Steve calls "multi touch" so to zoom in to a picture you un-pinch your fingers on the screen [00:33:00]. There is only one button in the hardware, a home key [00:15:20].
The device runs OS-X so it runs full blown applications, not the trimmed down stuff you see on most phones. That means it has a fully functioning browser for example. You sync your phone to your PC using iTunes. The phone includes an iPod application that allows creative way to scroll through album art (an app it calls Cover Flow). It supports widgets and email through either pop3 (Google Gmail, AOL Mail, Most IPSs) or imap (e.g. Yahoo Mail, MS Exchange, .Mac Mail). They've partnered with yahoo to offer free email.
One of the most impressive parts of the demonstration was when he demonstrated the call management features because it's hard to believe that he actually improved the basic functionality of a phone. When calls come in there's a picture of who's calling. You can answer the call and the person goes into a list. You can merge the call, unmerge the call, drop a call, switch between the calls all with the GUI interface. He made it seem really simple, far simpler than my RAZR. The phone also supports video voicemail which allows the user to pick which voicemail you want to listen to instead of listening to them in the order they came in [00:29:30]. At some point he called his favorite sushi restaurant (415-332-3940) sushi ran, you can't get a better recommendation than that.
The phone supports 5 hours life (16 hours of audio playback). It has a 2MP camera. It supports Bluetooth 2.0, WIFI and it switches between WIFI or the network intelligently.
Apple has teamed with Cingular and will start shipping the phone in June. It is priced at $500.
Just to get a sense of how big this market is, here are some stats from the speech. If you get 1% market share that means you've sold 10M units. [1:16:00]
Game consoles 26M Digit Cameras 94M MP3 players 135M PCs 209M Mobile phones 957M
It's a GSM phone so that means it won't work with the MetroPCS service I use but is so amazing that it might get me to switch phone carriers.
The video for the iPod introduction and the Macworld keynote are available on the Mac site.