Brain Drippings

Apple, as you no doubt heard, introduced their long-rumored iPhone yesterday at MacWorld. I won’t bore you with the details, just click the links if you need more info, but a few things stand out.

First of all, the iPhone has no keypad. There is one single button named “Home” that takes you back to the initial screen. The entire UI is integrated into a high resolution 3.5″ touch screen. Interaction with the iphone is simply a matter of touching the screen, and there are even multi-touch features where you can, for example, shrink and grow displayed information by squeezing two fingers together or spreading the fingers apart. The days of T9 or multitap text input are over as the iPhone will pop up a keyboard on the screen when you need to type text.

This, alone, is a stunning feature that would be worthy of a major announcement, but as is usual with Apple, this is just the beginning. A accelerometer is included, so the iPhone knows when you turn it sideways (landscape mode) and will dynamically change the display when you do so. there is a proximity sensor, so when you hold the phone up to your ear it disables the speaker phone, turns off the display, and disables the touch-screen. There’s even an ambient light sensor that controls the brightness of the display. The bluetooth headset (about the size of the cap off a ball-point pen) turns itself off and on automatically when needed, and the phone itself switches from mobile phone to Wifi internet access dynamically.

But back to this touch screen, Apple has really done something remarkable here as they have, in one short hour, completely redesigned the mobile phone. Say what you will, no future mobile will be free of the effects of yesterday’s announcement. How long will it take before other mobile phone companies are going to try and create copies of this phone? Not long, but fortunately it looks like Apple has a firm hold on a couple hundred patents, so clones will not be possible.
The iPhone is also an iPod nano, with the familiar iPod features one would expect, including a standard dock connector. It also has come features you might not expect, turn the iPhone sideways when you’re in iPod mode, for example, and the disaply changes to a CoverFlow display, showing all your album artworks. The Coverflow on the iPhone is actually better than even in iTunes, as it allows you to select tracks directly from the covers.

But that’s all just frosting. The real advance is in the basic ‘phone’ portion of the iPhone, and those advances are quite simply stunning. The iPhone has been rumored for years, but no one ever dared expect so much. It has every feature you could want in a high-end phone (GMS+EDGE, Quad band, BlueTooth, Wifi, email, etc) but it has it all in a gorgeous package that doesn’t take a CIS degree to figure out. With typical Apple aplomb the thing just does what it should do and, since it is not tied to buttons, it shows you exactly what you need to see on any screen you happen to be on.

The phone will not be available until June as it needs to be submitted to the FCC for certification, and will be out in the Fall in Europe. I will be interested to see how it is marketed in Europe and how much it costs. The US version is a Cingular exclusive, so T-Mobile customers are left out. The other US carriers are not GSM, so they couldn’t use the phone anyway. In Europe, however, mobiles are not sold locked to a single provider like they are in the US. If the price is right, I forsee a lot of t-mobile customers int eh US getting grey-market imports from Europe. I also forsee a lot of T-Mobile customers jumping ship. This is, hands down, the best mobile phone ever, and it’s only going to get better.

Oh, and the “one more thing”? It runs on OS X.

APPL is up about $10 since the start of the Keynote, and is still rising (up over $2 in after-hours trading)