jeremy borger [blog]

Holy crap, the Apple iPhone is AMAZING!Steve Job…

Holy crap, the Apple iPhone is AMAZING!

Steve Jobs announced the iPhone today during his MacWorld keynote. This thing is incredible. It’s 4.5 inches tall, 2.4 inches wide and just 0.46 inches thick with a beautiful 3.5″ diagonal widescreen display. Picture a video iPod but instead of having the screen at the top and the scroll wheel at the bottom, the entire thing is a touch-sensitive screen. So instead of having permanent plastic buttons when you dial, the screen can turn into a keypad. Or it can turn into a list of your phone contacts. Or it can turn into a mini keyboard when you’re typing a text message.

The voicemail functions are pretty cool because instead of having to dial into your voicemail and having to listen to voice prompts, you can just look at the screen and touch which voicemail you want to listen to, as you would with e-mail.

It syncs with iTunes and will hold all of your songs, just like your iPod. But they’ve changed the interface. There’s no scroll wheel. You push your finger up the screen and your playlists or artists or songs whiz by. It looks to be a very cool interface but is hard to explain with words. Apple has some videos that show how you interact with the songs on your iPhone.

You can access your e-mail on it. Use the touch screen keyboard to write or reply to an e-mail. It doesn’t use a stylus pen, just your fingers. I’m interested to see how easy it is to mistype something on that screen, but Steve says it’s very accurate.

It knows whether you’re holding it horizontally or vertically. So if someone e-mails you a photo they took horizontally, you can turn the iPhone and it will take advantage of the entire widescreen display. Also handy when you’re viewing pictures you took, because of course the iPhone comes with a built-in camera.

This also comes in handy when you’re browsing the internet. The iPhone includes a web browser that isn’t some watered down version like most phones have. It looks like the web browser on your computer. (actually, it looks EXACTLY like the web browser on my computer because the iPhone uses Safari, running on a portable version of Mac OS X) Again, the video demo of the browser is pure sweetness.

This thing is awesome. Again, it’s hard to describe in text, so if you have any interest in electronic gadgets at all, check out Apple’s web site which has video demos that really show what this thing can do. It blows any phone at any price on the market today out of the water. As someone at Slashdot said, “They’re going to print money with this thing.” Apparently, stockholders agree. Apple stock closed up over 8 percent today.

Cingular (actually, I guess they’re AT&T now) will be the exclusive provider. It ships in June and will cost $500 for the 4 GB model and $600 for the 8 GB model (both with a two year contract). At that price, it’s not really competing with phones like the Motorola RAZR or the LG Chocolate, but PDA-type phones such as the Motorola Q.

Guess I better start saving my pennies now… My current contract with Verizon doesn’t end until the middle of 2008, so I might just wait. Sometimes getting the second generation of something like this makes more sense.