Predictably, considering its background, Apple entered the mobile telecommunications market big time.
After months of rumors about its various functions and interfaces, iPhone is finally in the spotlight and has had people talking because of its innovative solutions, both in terms of style and technology. iPhone is a new revolutionary cell phone that allows you to make calls by simply pointing your finger at a name or number, to synchronize all your contacts and calendar from your PC, Mac® or Internet services such as Yahoo!, so that you can always have updated listes of contacts. Also, you can easily create a list of “favorites” for the most frequent calls. iPhone’s innovative Visual Voice mail, the first on the market, allows you to optimize the use of your answering machine: users can look at a list of vocal messages on their machine, decide what messages they want to listen to and will go directly to a message in particulars without listening to the previous ones. Just like with emails, iPhone’s Visual Voice mail allows users to immediately access the messages they are most interested in.
To send sms messages and type on spreadsheets, a convenient and elegant QWERTY keyboard will become the iPhone’s touch screen. It anticipates and corrects errors, thus making it easier to use and more efficient than many smartphones’ small plastic keyboards. The 2 Megapixel camera ensures high quality pictures and the possibility to store in your own photolibrary, which can be easily synchronized with your PC or Mac: with simple a movement of your finger you can choose a picture to plan as your desktop background or attach one by email.
A possible fault might be the fact that the battery can only be removed and replaced by specialized centers. However, the management is very smart and efficient way by means of two sophisticated, integrated sensors: an accelerometer, a proximity sensor and an ambient light sensor, which automatically improve the users’ experience and save battery power.
The integrated accelerometer senses the vertical or horizontal orientation of the phone, changes the contents on the screen accordingly and allows users to view web pages in widescreen modality or pictures in their correct horizontal proportions.
The proximity sensor senses when the iPhone is brought near the ear and immediately shuts off the display and inhibiting the sensibility of it to avoid accidental digitations during the phone call.
This saves power and prevents it from the ear until the phone is put down again.
The integrated ambient light sensor automatically adjusts the display brightness to the external light and therefore increases user-friendliness and saves power at the same time. The over 200 patents that Apple has filed for the technology behind the iPhone stand out as an indication of it being a definitely extraordinary device that will be available for pockets all over Europe as to leave from the next spring. In the US, its sale started last June with two available models: 4 GB ($499) and 8 GB ($599).
These prices don’t seem to have intimidated our overseas cousins, considering that during the first week this Apple jewel registered sales for 700,000 pieces.
Nevertheless, Apple has a “light” version in the pipeline, which is supposed to be cheaper and will similar to an iPod Nano. So, we can only wait. Meanwhile there is only one certainty: Nokia & co. have found dangerous competition.