Apple's Swivelin' iPhone

By now (and I mean "by now, four hours after Steve Jobs' speech at CES"), the world knows all about Apple's new iPhone -- a smart phone with an iTunes-compatible media player inside. The first iteration of iPhone will be a global quadband device for GSM-EDGE (3G will follow), with built-in WiFi. There's only one controller on the device: most interaction will be via a 160-pixel-per-inch widescreen touch-sensitive display. Cingular will be the nationwide carrier, to start.

Lots of good tech and thinking have evidently gone into this device. And two notes spring out from Jobs' address that reveal this fact. First, when asked "what's the killer app" with respect to the iPhone's phone functionality, Jobs replied: "The killer app is making calls!" and went on to detail how ridiculous the UI is for most telephones. By contrast, the iPhone UI emphasizes fast touch access to a highly-legible, synchronizable contact list; fluent first-party call control; and screen-based, multimedia unified messaging.

The second utterly-cool thing about iPhone is how many little sensors it incorporates. When you hold it up to your ear (presumably to make a phone call), a proximity sensor triggers the firmware to turn down background music. When you rotate it to its side, an accelerometer senses this, and iPhone flips the screen from portrait to landscape mode. And an ambient-light sensor automatically adjusts screen brightness for legibility in variable light conditions.

Posted by John Jainschigg at 03:58 PM  Permalink