Would you carry your life in your pocket?

On Tuesday Steve Jobs finally unveiled his long rumoured iPod/mobile phone device, cunningly named the “iPhone”, to room full of hungry Mac enthusiasts. If we were to take Jobs at his word, Apple have gone and “revolutionised the phone”. Well thank the good lord that this humble man is never prone to over-exaggeration :P Ya gotta love him though. He has the uncanny ability to take an item (or a piece of software) and speak of it with such genuine enthusiasm, that he’d have you believing it has the power to change your life in a very dramatic way (and with the iPhone, he might not be far off!)

In all seriousness though, its an amazing little piece of tech. Like all Apple devices, the design is sleek and simplistic. The iPhone is essentially a large touch sensitive screen, shaped like a rectangle. Fingers, as opposed to a stylus are used for navigating the interface. There is one solitary button (a home key) on its front. It accepts regular headphone jacks and has a built in mic. Its Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled. It has three types of sensors built into it. One can tell when the phone is near your face and turns off the touch sensitive function, so you don’t accidentally press anything with your ear. The other sensor can tell whether you are holding the device vertically or horizontally and will adjust the orientation of the screen to match (great if you are viewing pics or vids). The third measures the level of ambient light and adjusts the brightness of the screen, a nifty power-saving feature.

The unit also runs a full version of the latest Mac OS (as opposed to a light version of Windows that runs on most other handheld devices). Apples own browser “Safari” is integrated into the unit and displays web pages in full colour, with pictures and text. Any part of the page can be zoomed in on and you can have multiple pages open at the same time. There is collaboration with Yahoo to give users Yahoo PUSH mail accounts, so whenever you receive a mail, you’ll immediately be notified of it. For texting or emailing, a full QWERTY keyboard appears (only when needed) at the bottom half of the screen. Google map service was also displayed quite effectively on the device.

It has all the functionality of the regular video iPod, except that this one has the rather cool sliding album art feature (previously only available if iTunes was running on a PC). Gone is the circular scroll wheel and instead users now touch and flick the screen up or down to scroll the list of albums/artists. The interface was very smooth and really has to be seen to be believed (a flash demonstration can be found on Apple.com).

The 2 megapixel camera was mentioned, but never actually displayed during the presentation. The picture viewer was clean and simple and had a novel way of zooming in or out of photos. By touching the screen with two fingers and literally pinching the picture, it will get small. Moving your fingers apart and the picture will enlarge, as if you were actually stretching it!

The unit will come in two memory sizes, 4 and 8 gigs (though I imagine this will increase as 2nd and 3rd generations of the device appear down the line). Battery life is rated at 5 hours for vids and talktime and 16 hours for music listening. It will be available in the US in June (and in the last quarter of 07 here) and will retail at $499 and $599, depending on memory size. The only hitch (as far as the States is concerned at least) is that its only available on a two year contract from one (and ONLY one) particular mobile network service provider.

Because of Apples insistence on the sole use of its proprietary formats on the device (except for mp3s), I’m still discouraged from ever getting one one, but I think that where Apple goes, others manufacturers will follow. The iPhone offers a tantalising glimpse of what we can expect from multipurpose products in the future. Being the uber-nerd I am, seeing the device called to mind the little handheld devices people would always use on Star Trek, (and no, I’m not talking tri-corders!) and it scares me to think just how close to that kinda technology we are :D