Granted, i haven’t seen it in person or used it, but i watched the Macworld speech by Steve Jobs about it and let me tell you – the phone looks incredible. The phone looks awesome but more than that, it is over-delivering. Again, Apple is taking everyone’s expectations, throwing them out the window and giving us something that we didn’t even dream about. There were months of speculation and NONE of them were even close to this. It was never a question of whether or not mobile phones would replace iPods, but rather a question of when. Apple knew this and made the most rockin’ mobile phone one could imagine. Here’s what it’s got….
- Thin as hell. While it is somewhat large which is nice for watching videos, it is really thin and pretty sleek.
- Touch screen. While i’ve not a big fan of them in the past, it looks like they’ve thought about all the screwups that usually happen and made this screen really sizzle. The mouse on MacBooks are really good with recognizing multiple finger scrolling and supposedly the iPhone is too. Also, touch screens can change when you add in applications or change functionality so this phone is forward-compatible.
- A super-high-resolution screen. This makes videos, photos, and web browsing really a fun (or non-painful) experience. Putting only 1/5 of a browser on a screen, which is what most phones do, sucks. The iPhone screen is much better so that a whole browser screen can fit and it makes regular photos and desktop images gorgeous.
- It’s also an iPod. Having it be an iPod too is the way to go. I can imagine a day when all iPods are cell phones. Synergy, got to love it.
- Sycnhing contacts and photos and music, which is really painful for most phones as their computer software sucks. Apple does this really well with iTunes and iPods and this phone will synch with iTunes too which makes lots of sense.
- Wi-fi capabilities. Cell networks sometime suck, so it’s nice to be able to jump onto a wireless connection if it is available. Browing the web on this thing will be fast too.
- Google Maps built in. My current phone has Blackberry maps built in and it’s a great feature to have on a phone. Google Maps are even better (Double True!) so that’s a big plus. I’ve yet to see any phone have this feature. It shows that bringing Google’s CEO onto the Apple board was good for something.
- Voicemail browsing similar to email browsing. Don’t know why this hasn’t been done before but it’s awesome.
- Even the bluetooth accessories look slick
Some other specifics: $499 (4GB) or $599 (8GB) avaialble in June with 2 commitment from Cingular.
