Apple Announces iPhone

Yay!, After years of anticipation and rumors, Apple finally made the big announcement on iPhone at Macworld. Here’s a brief list of features:

• 11.6 mm (thickness)
• 3.5 in. (width)
• Runs Mac OS X (access to Safari Web browser)
• Touchscreen display with multi-touch support
• 2 Megapixel camera
• 8 GB storage
• Bluetooth with EDR and also WiFi
• Quadband GSM radio with EDGE
• EDGE or WiFi, the phone switches to WiFi when detected
• Google Maps: Satellite directions, traffic monitoring, and normal maps.
• Random access voicemail
• Widgets: Weather and stocks
• Photo album lets you scroll through images with your finger and you can zoom in/out by “squeezing” or “pinching” the screen with two fingers.
• The orientation of the screen (landscape or portrait) will automatically rotate based upon the orientation of the device itself.

According to Apple, iPhone’s battery holds 5 hours of Video or Talk, 16 hours or music. iPhone is available in 4GB and 8GB variants and costs $499 and $599 respectively. 

Looks like Apple has squeezed everything into iPhone, I was shocked to read that it runs OS X and has a iChat like SMS application with onscreen keyboard. I was expecting a 3.2 Megapixel camera on iPhone, but 2 Megapixel seems to be a standard thesedays. iPhone users would probable carry an iPod, because 8GB is quite low when compare to high end iPods. 

Now the bad news is that iPhone won’t start shipping until June 2007. European stores will get iPhone somewhere around fourth quarter 2007, It will reach Asia by 2008. Damn!, I’ll have to wait for a year.

Source: CyberTech, Gizmodo