Apple delivered with iPhone on multiple fronts

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 11 January 2007 18:38

Your IT - Mobility

So a real Mac Tablet could be on the cards for this year. Clearly OS X 10.5 is on the way, too – Apple has already said so. And with the Santa Rosa platform for Intel’s Core 2 Duo still due to arrive, new MacBooks with this underlying motherboard and processor architecture will soon be arriving from Apple, too.

Given that Steve Jobs, in his keynote, had his iPhone hooked up to a cable that showed us what he was doing with his iPhone on the big screen, is this something we’ll be able to do, too? In the keynote, Jobs explained, from memory, that the iPhone he was holding was specially modified to allow us to see what he was showing doing as he was doing it. You could see a cable coming out of the side of the iPhone, too.

If the iPhone can be turned into more of a ‘real computer’ when connected up to an LCD screen or even your television, it would make the iPhone even more useful. A Bluetooth keyboard would let us enter data in the conventional way, while the screen of the iPhone could well be the ‘touchpad’ or mouse that we’d use to navigate the device while looking at things on the larger screen.

Already Nokia and Microsoft phones can be used in this way, so Apple could easily do it with the iPhone too, if they wanted. And given that iPods already have a video out capability, you’d expect that the iPhone would have one too, wouldn’t you?

One thing is for sure with the iPhone. There is a great deal that we do not know about it. No doubt Steve Jobs has some more surprises up his sleeve that will be unveiled either closer to the time of the iPhone’s actual launch, or will be unveiled on the real launch day itself.

Steve Jobs is the master of anticipation and surprise. I’m sure there’s at least ‘one more thing’, if not many, many things, that are still to be unveiled that will surprise and delight us all, either when the time is right, or the iPhone is physically available in stores.

It’s going to be an exciting few months of ongoing speculation until you can buy an iPhone in stores. And before then, Steve Jobs may well deliver upon some of the other developments we’re expecting, from a smaller MacBook to a big-screen TV with a Mac built-in, to Mac OS X 10.5.

Steve Jobs has been teasing us all. He’s obviously known about the iPhone for years now. When he launched the 2nd-gen Nano and the 5.5G iPod Video, the iPhone was only months away from completion and no doubt already well advanced. There’s plenty more Steve’s not telling us for now, for the time is not right.

If 2007 is just the beginning, as Apple says, then when it comes to the iPhone and all the other upcoming developments… expecting the unexpected is what I’ll be doing. After all, it would seem that for Apple… impossible is nothing.