Jobs and new Apple reinvent the phone and deliver again in style

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 10 January 2007 06:09

Opinion and Analysis

Browsing the net using Safari is among the more impressive features. Having a full computer strength Web page on a 3.5 inch screen – in fact multiple pages if required – is something to be seen to be believed. Being able to zoom in and out on sections of a page by simply tapping that part of the screen with your finger and changing the orientation of a page by rotating the iPhone 90 degrees, makes full strength web browsing practical and user friendly.

On the iPod side of things, the scroll wheel has been replaced by finger screen scrolling and music gets automatically interrupted and paused by an incoming phone call. Otherwise the iPhone works just like an iPod when in music player mode.

The actual phone side of the iPhone is no less impressive than the other features of this device. It has a proximity sensor that turns off the screen when you bring it close to your ear. As Jobs said during his demonstration: “We want to reinvent the phone – the killer app is making calls.”

The way quad band GSM plus EDGE iPhone (3G versions are promised in the future) differentiates itself in the voice calls area is essentially ease of use plus some extra functions, including Wi-Fi and BlueTooth 2.0. Syncing contacts with a Mac or PC enables users to load all the contacts in their email address book.

Users can access voicemail messages randomly rather than being forced to go through them sequentially and scrolling through contacts and adding them to a favourites list is a breeze. Even manual dialling through an onscreen keypad is cool as numbers dialled get resized down the longer the number gets so that they stay on a single line of the screen.

Jobs gave a demonstration of the phone by dialling a friend. While talking to his friend, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, placed a call to Jobs from the floor of the auditorium. Jobs with a couple of taps of his finger put his friend on hold, spoke to Schiller and then with a couple more taps set up a three-way conference with his friend and Schiller. It was pretty impressive stuff that had the crowd in raptures.

For the coup de grace, Jobs demonstrated the use of integrated Google Maps and Google Earth features of the phone. Zooming in on famous land marks was impressive enough, but what got me was his ability to search for a local Starbucks stores, choose the closest one in San Francisco and click on a hyperlink to dial a number.