14 DAY TRIAL // The wait has ended and the rumors died when the truth came out and struck us in the face after the Steve Jobs keynote at the CES 2007 in Las Vegas. The people that witnessed it say it was truly amazing seeing what this phone is capable to do and how easy it does it. I have to confess I just couldn't keep my eyes off of it when I saw the first pictures released on the web.
It is plain gorgeous and all the people working at Softpedia agree with this. I for one am pretty excited right now about this and, even if I won't get my hands on it for quite some time, at least I have finally found out what it is going to look like and what the damn thing is capable of.
To make the story short, let's see what the Cingular customers will get for their money. If you haven't found out yet, this is the carrier chosen by Apple for their communication jewel.
The iPhone is a 11.6 mm sheet of aluminum, with a huge flawless and vivid 3.5 inch 160 dpi touchscreen working at a 320x480 pixels resolution, a screen that will respond to the multi touch and multi gestures so be prepared to scare the crap out of your friends and show them what a real touchscreen should really be capable of.
It has a full featured Safari browser and believing what the people that had a hands-on experience with the device, the landscape view of the pages will make you fall out of your chair. Besides the incredible viewing experience, you'll also be able to zoom in and out by a simple touch and you shouldn't be afraid the page arrangement will get all screwed up because the implemented Safari browser will pop in automatically and will scale down the images.
What else? Apple's Mac OS X operating system built-in into a mobile device. Sounds cool and beyond belief and it truly is. If it weren't for the guys that saw it at CES, I wouldn't even give it the smallest chance to be accomplished and most probably, I would have taken it as a simple rumor. Now, I can't quite imagine how they pulled this one off but it really is for the good of all of us because now everyone gets to make use of the easiest to handle operating system of the moment.
Or so say the Apple fans! I'm not very sure about that but seeing what the guys from their design team did when working on a simple cellphone, I have to give them credit and recognize they probably say the truth about the operating system too. They have managed to make a user interface clever as I never thought it is possible on a mobile phone. You can do everything you want and most of the time, the OS will surely get done exactly what you have intended in the first place because it can very easily make a difference between the user's intention and the accidental gestures and brushes you will make on the 3.5 inch touchscreen.
As Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, said at CES 2007: "iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone. We are all born with the ultimate pointing device - our fingers - and iPhone uses them to create the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse."
Users will also be happy to find out this is a quad-band GSM (850, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz networks) device richly flavored with little crams of Bluetooth 2.0, EDGE capability and of course WiFi 802.11 b/g. Don't begin cursing on the matter of the 3G because you have to know these specs or the firmware aren't the final thing and, even more, the hardware can very well get changed if the crowd thinks it needs readjustment.
Returning at the goodies Apple has built-in in this handset, you will surely be happy to know they have also thought about the battery life of your future precious iPhone. The device has a built-in proximity sensor that will take care of all the turning on and off the display trouble so the battery will live longer. How is this accomplished? When the user lifts the iPhone to its ear to make or answer a call, the proximity sensor automatically turns off the display to save power and also to prevent accidental touchscreen actions while the phone touches the ear. Even more, for the outdoor scary cats of you, they have implemented an ambient light sensor that will automatically adjust the display's brightness level to be able to offer the proper viewing conditions whatever environment you might be in.
And these aren't the only things you'll be able to enjoy after taking it home! You'll also get to make fast searches from the Safari browser using Google's and Yahoo's search engines, use Google Maps at a whole new level due to iPhone's amazing maps application that will let you call any number attached to a certain point of interest on Google Maps and at the same time, view traffic information, get directions, view satellite images of various places, all of these by making use of the incredibly simple touch interface.
The Blackberry users will also find interesting things to play with on the Apple iPhone because this device provides us with a full featured HTML email client that will automatically fetch your emails from most POP3 or IMAP mail services, like Microsoft Exchange, Apple .Mac Mail, Google Gmail and AOL Mail. Don't worry for a single moment that you will waste your time while the iPhone gets your email because this a smart handset that features full multi-tasking, so you'll be able to listen to music, watch videos, browse the web and even make calls when it will take care of your email business.
Have you fears about how you're going to get multimedia content on your newly bought iPhone? Put your worries aside because this task will get very easily done with the help of Apple's iTunes service and when you think about how much content the iTunes Store contains, you will definitely think this is the best choice! At the moment, you can get access, through iTunes, to over 250 movies, 350 television shows, over 500 music videos and who knows how many music albums. Quite a lot of things to choose from, isn't it? :D
What else? How about a 2 megapixel camera and a full featured photo management application that will make you think why the other smartphones brag about helping the users deal with all their snapshots. This picture management system will let you browse your photos and also synchronize them with your PC or Mac very easily using just a finger stroke.
The 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46 inches (115 x 61 x 11.6 mm) iPhone is a thin device considering what it is capable of, the thinnest smartphone on the market at the moment, although there will surely be a few people discussing this smartphone matter. A conventional smartphone offers its users the possibility to extend their devices' functionality by installing a lot of other applications supported by the handset's operating system but, as we have discovered, the iPhone contains proprietary Apple software and will let nobody install anything.
This could probably mean that it actually isn't a smartphone at all thus a whole new thing comes up in one's mind. If it really isn't "smart" than it must be something totally different than what we have seen before and, believe me, this is exactly what I was expecting from the Apple crew after such a long time of wait.
This new type of phone will offer you 5 continuous hours of talk, video and browsing or, for the audio maniacs, 16 hours of audio playback. Don't know yet if these are the figures that will end up to be the real battery life of the iPhone in those conditions but if they will, the future sounds really good.
There still are things that kind of make every mobile phone user on the face of the earth a little sad when reading what the iPhone has to offer and, yes, the time to get picky has arrived. The iPhone totally lacks a replaceable battery, so when the battery is dead, you'll end up in an Apple service or even buying another iPhone, it doesn't have expandable memory (not such a big drawback considering it will come in 4 GB and 8 GB models), it features a proprietary software platform, the OS X operating system that might make every user buy software applications through iTunes or some other type of DRM enabled solution, a glossy shiny surface that will get scratched very easily, there still is the question of what kind of storage Apple has chosen for the two variants of the iPhone because if they will go for the hard drives, there are a lot of chances to see your handset get a big surprising freeze when you least expect it so I will definitely go for the flash drive solution and, finally, I still worry about the actual battery life of the iPhone. Why? Because most of the cases, the battery lives announced by Apple for its electronic devices suddenly shrunk down to nearly half when they arrived in the user's hands.
But let's not get so mean and recognize Apple's accomplishments when discussing the iPhone matter and if you'd think for a bit, you'll suddenly realize they did a lot of things with so little. Just consider the EDGE capability and the fact that the iPhone is able to let you enjoy talking, sending text and surf the web at the same time. Doesn't it sound a little weird? It should because for a long time, EDGE has been known not to support such a thing.
So Apple and Cingular most have done something to it and from the looks of things when trying to discover a solution to deliver this type of mobile experience, it must have been pretty tough. But they did it and we should be thankful for it (or at least the Cingular users from USA).
Drawing the line, the iPhone will come in 4 and 8 GB models, with price tags of 499 and 599 $, first on Cingular's network in USA sometime in June 2007, in Europe in this year's 4th quarter and in Asia in 2008. Finally, we get to be the ones telling the stories and sending the pictures to the Asians :).
