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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mick Mørmøny who wrote (59881)	1/9/2007 10:05:06 PM
From: Mick Mørmøny	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213182

The iPhone Rumors Are Right…Finally By David Pogue January 9, 2007, 3:49 pm Tags: Apple, cellphones, iPhone, Macworld OK, so after three years of being wrong, the rumor sites were finally right. Now there IS an Apple cellphone. Or, rather, will be one in June. There has never been a Macworld Expo keynote speech quite like the one Steve Jobs just gave, one that was devoted entirely to a single product. Nothing about Macs, nothing about new iPods, not even a word about the iLife software suite or Mac OS X “Leopard.” But you can see why; there was enough to show and tell about the iPhone to fill the full 2.5 hours—and to justify the standing ovation the crazed Applephiles gave it. It’s quite a device. It’s a hair taller and wider than a Treo but thinner, sleeker and of course much more beautiful (4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46). The front is glossy black; the back is brushed silver. There’s not much on the front but a 3.5-inch touch screen with incredibly high resolution—160 pixels per inch (320 by 480)—and not much on the brushed-silver back except a two-megapixel camera lens. (Only the Apple logo is mirror finish; it doubles as the self-portrait mirror.) There’s just an unbelievable amount of technology in this thing: a proximity sensor that turns off the screen (both illumination and touch sensitivity) when you’re holding to your head. An accelerometer that rotates the screen 90 degrees when you turn the phone in your hand. An ambient light sensor that brightens the screen in bright light. And a touch screen that lets you perform two-finger gestures—for example, you pinch your thumb and forefinger to shrink a photo, or widen them to enlarge it, exactly as pioneered by multi-touch pioneer Jeff Han, whom I wrote about last August. As you’ve probably already heard, the phone is also a 4 or 8-gigabyte iPod, capable of playing music, photos and video; a full-blown Wi-Fi or cellular Internet screen, complete with Safari Web browser, “push” e-mail supplied free from Yahoo, and threaded SMS messaging that looks and sounds exactly like Apple’s chat program, iChat. In other words, it’s not what you’d normally think of as a cellphone. It has elements of a desktop computer (it actually runs a version of Mac OS X), a wireless Internet tablet, and an Archos-type pocket video player. But what you can’t get from any printed description is how it’s all sewn together with typical Apple polish and grace, with delicious animations and gorgeous graphics. (The crowd went nuts when Steve Jobs demonstrated how you scroll through your iTunes music list: you flick your finger upward or downward on the screen. The list flashes by, slowly coming to a stop like a roulette wheel.) Now, there will be plenty of people who will pass on the iPhone: people who have no Cingular service where they live (that’s the exclusive carrier); who are disappointed that, as a GSM phone, the cellular Internet service is slow; who find the iPhone too big (though incredibly tiny for what it does, it’s big for a phone); who would prefer typing e-mail with a dedicated thumb keyboard than hunting and pecking with one finger on the iPhone’s on-screen keys; and who consider $500 too much for a phone. Everyone else, however, will be beating a path to the iPhone’s door. The iPod showed us how breathtaking beauty and effortless simplicity can trump any number of practical quibbles in the real-world marketplace. This thing will go through the roof, exactly according to Apple’s master plan. Prepare for a replay of the iPod lifecycle: other cellphone companies will rush out phones that match the iPhone’s feature list, but will fail to appreciate the importance of elegant, effortless, magical-feeling software. The hard part will be waiting for June to come. bits.blogs.nytimes.com