Final week of iPhone pre-launch mania has begun!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 25 June 2007 17:12

Your IT - Mobility

The iPhone is different. Whether you’re highly tech savvy, moderately so or not at all, the iPhone is the smartphone for the rest of us. Despite years of touch screens, we’ve never seen another smartphone anything quite like it.

And unlike lots of other technology, the iPhone just seems to be wanting to be touched, inviting you to use it, and rewarding you with a visual and touch controlled interface that looks like it's come right from 2107, instead of looking like a polished color version of the black-and-white cell phone interface from the 1990s.

Even without the very best features of 3.5G capability, a 5 megapixel camera, a memory slot in additional to any internal memory, a removable battery and more, the iPhone’s interface and touch screen system appears to, in all the demos we’ve seen, outdo the interface of all its competitors, and when it comes to the human-to-machine, this key element is all important, as it has been for the iPod.

Many questions will be answered once the iPhone is launched and people can start using it, instead of just talking about it. We’ll know just how good the iPhone’s case and screen are  at withstanding accidental drops.

We’ll see a flood of accessories, cases, headphones, screen cleaners, remote controls, FM radio adaptors, rechargeable battery packs to plug into the iPhone’s dock port and, if Apple has used the same Bluetooth as everyone else, the likelihood of Bluetooth keyboards for iPhone use, perhaps even a protective case the iPhone snaps into with Bluetooth keyboard (or thumb board) built in!

The chance that there’s still yet one more big surprise to come from Steve Jobs can’t be discounted. If it transpired that, at 6pm when the iPhone officially goes on sale, there is one more massive feature that Steve Jobs kept ‘til the very end, it would certainly be the ultimate ‘one more thing’.

We’ll just have to wait until 6pm on June 29 to find out!