Apple unveils its iPhone

[Al-khiyal]

SAN FRANCISCO: Apple Computer's chief executive, Steve Jobs, unveiled on Tuesday a new mobile phone that downloads and plays music as well as a set- top box that allows people to stream video from their computers to their televisions.

Jobs said Apple's iPhone would "reinvent" the telecommunications sector and "leapfrog" past the current generation of hard-to-use smart phones.

"Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything," he said during his keynote address at the annual Macworld Conference and Expo.

"It's very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career," he added. "Apple's been very fortunate in that it's introduced a few of these."

Apple shares were up $4.29 to $89.76 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Jobs demonstrated the phone's music capabilities by playing "Lovely Rita, Meter Maid," from the Beatles' "Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band."

IPhone uses a patented touch-screen technology Apple is calling "multi- touch."

"We're going to use a pointing device that we're all born with," Jobs said. 'It's far more accurate than any touch display ever shipped. It ignores unintended touches. It's super smart."

The phone automatically synchs your media — movies, music, photos — through Apple's iTunes digital content store. The device also synchs e-mail content, Web bookmarks and nearly any type of digital content stored on your computer.

"It's just like an iPod," Jobs said, "charge and synch."

IPhone is less than a half-inch thin — less than almost any phone on the market today. It comes with a 2-megapixel digital camera built into the back, as well as a slot for headphones and a SIM card. Jobs did not immediately provide details on price or availability.

Jobs also said the company will begin taking orders Tuesday for $299 video box, called Apple TV. It will be available in February.

The gadget is designed to bridge computers and television sets so users can more easily watch their downloaded movies on a big screen. A prototype of the gadget was displayed by Jobs in September when Apple announced it would sell TV shows and movies through its iTunes online store.

The product could be as revolutionary to digital movies as Apple's iPod music player was to digital music. Both devices liberate media from the computer, allowing people to enjoy digital files without being chained to a desktop or laptop.

"It's really, really easy to use," Jobs told the crowd at San Francisco's Moscone Center before demonstrating the system with a video clip of "The Good Shepherd." "It's got the processing horsepower to do the kinds of things we like to do."

Apple TV will come with a 40-gigabyte hard drive that stores up to 50 hours of video. It features an Intel microprocessor and can handle videos, photos and music streamed from up to five computers within the wireless range.

Jobs also said Apple has sold more than 2 billion songs on its popular iTunes music download service, catapulting the company into the top ranks of music sellers worldwide. Apple, which sells 58 songs per second, or 5 million songs a day, sells more songs than Amazon.com and ranks behind only Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target as a music retailer.

"We couldn't be happier with the growth rate of iTunes," Jobs said.

He said Apple will sell digital movies from Paramount. Apple has partnered with Disney for several months, offering about 100 movies on iTunes. With Paramount's selection, it will have 250 movies available for downloading on the site.

With Tuesday's product introductions, it remains to be seen whether the leading seller of digital music players can colonize an entirely new category of gadgets. Apple could use a megahit along the lines of its iconic iPod to divert investors' attention from the stock options-backdating scandal that has tainted its reputation.

The backdating of stock options, which has been widespread among Silicon Valley companies, involves pegging stock options to favorable grant dates in the past to boost the recipients' award.

It isn't necessarily illegal, but securities laws require companies to properly disclose the practice in their accounting and settle any charges that may result.

In a December filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Apple said Jobs was aware of, or recommended the selection of, some favorable grant dates but he neither benefited financially from them nor "appreciated the accounting implications."

Apple unveils its iPhone

[Bent_Bladi]

i dunno, are there many different kinds or are these just models and only one made it through...

[Al-khiyal]

Apple ignored another company's trademark by using the name "iPhone" to describe the much-hyped new iPod-cum-mobile phone it launched this week. It now faces an expensive legal battle against Cisco Systems, the telecoms technology company, which launched legal proceedings for trademark infringement against Apple last night.

Cisco has owned a trademark on the iPhone name since 2000, and last month it launched a range of voice-over-internet telephone handsets under the iPhone brand.

Cisco had presented Apple with the terms of a potential licensing deal on the eve of the Macworld convention in San Francisco, where Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs launched the phone on Tuesday, but its overtures were rejected.

Mark Chandler, Cisco's lead lawyer, said: "There is no doubt that Apple's new phone is very exciting, but they should not be using our trademark without our permission."

Apple argues that because its device is a mobile phone, rather than a landline, it is not infringing Cisco's trademark.

Apple sued over use of iPhone trademark

[Al-khiyal]

Consumer products of themselves do not change the world economy. Nevertheless when a new product neatly slots into a known gap it can make a material difference in the way people use their time and hence have a material impact on the economy.

It is possible, though not at all certain, that Apple Inc's new iPhone may turn out to be such a product. Of course it is not nearly as important as the mobile phone itself, which has achieved faster global penetration than any new product in the history of the world and has transformed economic activities particularly in China, India and Africa. It is even possible that it will turn out to be a commercial failure. But it is equally possible that it will be a catalyst for change in mobile telephony, stimulating a host of new applications that really will transform the world economy.

The argument runs like this. The US pioneered computer ownership and the internet but it has lagged badly on mobile telephony. So new developments in the States, such as YouTube, have tended to be designed for the PC rather than the mobile phone, even if the mobile phone camera does have an increasingly important role in video recording. The most important product spanning the two technologies, the BlackBerry, came from Canada rather than US.

Within most of the developed world, this has not been of great significance. Internet penetration in Western Europe and Japan is high enough - typically three-quarters of the rate of the US. However in the developing world mobile phone penetration has raced ahead of both computer ownership and access to the internet. You would expect that to have happened because, after all, a mobile phone is cheaper than a computer. The effect is that if you want to deliver services in China or India by an electronic means, a mobile phone is a much better mechanism than a computer.

Take banking services. Here we have become accustomed to Internet banking but mobile phone banking is pretty embryonic. But last month my colleague Jeremy Warner was in India and saw a new mobile phone banking system developed by Infosys, which was extremely simple and user friendly. If your customers have a mobile phone on them all the time but have to go into an internet café to go online, it is a no-brainer as to which device they would chose to use for banking.

You can see the scale of the transatlantic divide the first two graphs. The US and Canada top the G7 league in computer ownership but come right at the bottom in mobile phone penetration. You can also see how a quarter of the Chinese population has a mobile phone in contrast to the still-low numbers of computers; in India the levels of both are lower but the disparity is much the same.

India and East Asia, and to some extent Scandinavia, have been adept at developing new ways of using mobile telephony. We have had some interesting innovation here, particularly with the use of text services - though I'm none-too-sure that I want a text warning me that there is about to be a terrorist attack, the new service just announced by the Government. But as noted above there has not been much innovation coming from the US.

Now that may change. That seems to me to be the underlying significance of the iPhone. The US company with the best record for combining sleek design with intuitive functionality - the extraordinary ability to figure out what people want before they know they want it - may have created a product that will end the trans-Atlantic divide. Americans have been gradually going mobile; this will complete the process.

If this is right, and you do have to take everything that is said about the iPhone with a pinch of salt, this will stimulate a global quest for new mobile services. There will certainly be a barrage of new phones doing similar things and they too will provoke the development of new services.

What will these services be? We cannot know and in any case they will take months, years indeed, to be developed. Americans don't get the phone for another six months and we won't get it until the end of the year. We can however say a few things.

One is that the services could come from anywhere, since the iPhone will be a global product - apparently it will be a GSM quad-band - and that they won't come just from large companies but from small start-ups too.

A second is that some of these start-ups will be in sheds in Mumbai and Shanghai as well as offices in Palo Alto, though the interaction between finance and entrepreneurs in California remains one of the great strengths of the US hi-tech industry.

A third is that while as a general rule the software is more interesting than the hardware, this may be another example, like the iPod, where the hardware matters too. Don't underrate the power of fashion, which matters just as much as functionality.

Fourth, this will give a big boost to the broadband revolution, which itself is encouraging the development of new services, the promotion of e-commerce and so on. The final graph shows the way in which broadband has swept across the developed world. But large parts of the developing world have yet to get it because the fixed-line network is inadequate. Broadband mobile will be given a kick-start not just in the developed world, where it is not really necessary, but in the developing world. So a side- effect of the iPhone will be to further level the global playing field.

This leads to a final point. This is how a stylish chunk of American innovation sharpens our perception of a world where competitive advantage is a much more fluid concept than it has even been before. The US can still out- innovate the rest of the world. We often forget that. Where these phones, and their competitors, end up being made is less important than the ability of the US (or indeed other developed countries) to conceive, design and market them. Design matters. Culture matters. And for the moment at least, the US - and in a rather different way, Europe - still seems able to create the products and services that retain our economic leadership and to some extent at least, justify our standard of living.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to watch for in the coming 18 months will be not so much the commercial success or otherwise of the iPhone, though that will be fascinating. It will be the social consequences of the product. What services will be winners? Will there be at last real convergence between the computer and the mobile phone? What new business opportunities will emerge in, say, sub-Saharan Africa as a result?

Apple's iPhone won't change the world. But the innovation it unleashes just might

[piccolomondo]

"Steve Jobs took a call on the iPhone during the Keynote.

An anonymous Gizmodo fan took the time to extract the ringtone audio from the presentation, clean up the static and the sound of 1,000 fanboys, and send it on in for our loyal and awesome-tastic readers to load onto their plebeian handsets.

We've got the skins, the papercraft model,
and now we've got the ringtone."

iPhone Ringtone

[Al-khiyal]

SAN FRANCISCO, June 13, 2007: If there is a billion-dollar gamble underlying Apple's iPhone, it lies in what this smart cellphone does not have: a mechanical keyboard.

As the clearest expression yet of the Apple chief executive's spartan design aesthetic, the iPhone sports only one mechanical button, to return a user to the home screen.

It echoes Steven Jobs's decree two decades ago that a computer mouse should have a single button. (Most computer mice these days have two.) His argument was that one button made it impossible to push the wrong one.

The keyboard is built into other phones, those designed for business people as well as teenagers. But the lack of a keyboard could be a clever industrial design solution. It allows the iPhone to have a big 3.5-inch, or 8.7-centimeter, screen, making it attractive for alternative uses like watching movies.

That could open up new revenue streams for Apple and its partner, AT&T.

The downside is that typing is done by pecking on the screen with thumbs or fingers, something hardly anyone outside of Apple has experienced yet.

"The tactile feedback of a mechanical keyboard is a pretty important aspect of human interaction," said Bill Moggeridge, a founder of Ideo, an industrial design company in Palo Alto, California. "If you take that away you tend to be very insecure."

Jobs and other Apple executives argue that the keyboard that pops up onscreen will be a painless compromise. The onscreen keyboard has a dictionary-lookup feature that tries to predict the word being typed, catching errors as they are made.

That requires users to learn the new system, a task Apple executives acknowledge may require several days. Last month at an industry conference, Jobs dismissed doubts about relying on a virtual keyboard, saying that users only had to learn to trust the keyboard, "and then you will fly."

Yet in the days before the phone is scheduled to go on sale at Apple and AT&T stores around the United States, on June 29, designers and marketers of electronic devices centers are having a spirited debate about whether consumers will have the patience to type without the familiar tactile feedback offered by conventional keyboards.

"There has never been a massively successful consumer device based solely on a touch screen," warned Sky Dayton, chief executive of Helio, a cellular network service that has recently introduced an innovative handset that integrates Google maps with a GPS system.

"Texting" is central to an entire generation of people, Dayton argued, and Apple is taking a risk in not making that a central design feature.

Dispensing with a physical keyboard has given software an increased importance over hardware in product design, said Mark Rolston, senior vice president at Frog Design, an industrial design consulting firm.

A result, he said, has been a richer conversation between Frog's designers and customers because the software presents a much wider range of options for features.

Overnight that has changed, and that has resulted in significant new business for design companies like Frog. "We're being engaged by many more customers with more aggressive ideas about what to do," he said.

Rolston believes that Jobs will get away with his gamble. "They took a risk and it's a bold step for the industry," he said. "This is a worthwhile risk."

The handful of users outside Apple who have been able to play with the device report that the company has made an important step forward in the art of controlling computer systems. It may teach a new generation of technology users to use their fingers rather than a mouse - a four-decade-old technology - as a pointing and command device.

Apple's multitouch technology, which permits control gestures with one or more fingers or thumbs and which is also being explored by other companies, including Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, is a much more direct way to interact with a computer. Software designers have injected virtual "physics" into the user's experience.

For example, sliding a finger along the screen in a directory will cause the index to slide as if it were a piece of paper on a flat surface.

The new phone may resonate with a new kind of mobile user, said Donald Norman, a product designer who is co-director of the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

"Apple says, 'We're not selling to the person who lives on his Blackberry, we're selling to the person who listens to music and surfs the Web,' " he said.

The iPhone is missing a keyboard

[piccolomondo]

Mobius explains "Why I won't be buying an iPhone and why you shouldn't either":

... But then, today, something dawned on me: something I'd almost forgotten and something that, as both a matter of principle, and as a matter of personal data security, I simply can not abide.

Apple has chosen Cingular to be their network partner and Cingular, which merged with AT&T Wireless in 2004, has now officially been rebranded AT&T Wireless. Leaving aside the countless other class action lawsuits against AT&T Wireless (which, mind you, include cases in which it was proven that AT&T Wireless had tacked millions of dollars in false charges onto their customers bills; which I know because, as a former customer, I received a settlement check), AT&T is currently being sued for collaborating without hesitation in the Bush administration's illegal domestic wiretapping program.

Ponder this for a minute: the iPhone -- voice and data communications.
Your most personal and intimate calls and emails in the hands of people who jump at the chance to rat you out to Big Brother, even when Big Brother is in clear violation of your Constitutional rights.

I don't friggin' think so. There ain't no way, no how, that I will ever willingly give a dollar of my hard earned money to a corporation that willingly tramples my rights (likely in exchange for favoritism from the SEC and FCC). ...