Apple's iPhone, finally unveiled.

Apple has unveiled its long waiting iPhone yesterday. The iPhone brings together the features of iPod, digital camera, smartphones, portable PC and an innovative input method.

The Apple iPhone uses the input technology called “Multi-Touch”. It only has one Home button. You can control the phone by touching the 3.5” display (320x480).

The iPhone runs Mac OS X operating system, has full iTunes integration and can synchronize with a Mac, PC (yes, the PC!), or Internet service. Therefore, you can transfer your music and video from iTunes, contacts, calendars, photos, notes, bookmarks and email accounts easily.

The phone is 11.6mm thick and weights 135g. It has a 2-megapixel camera, 3.5mm headset/audio jack, speaker, microphone and a 30-pin iPod dock connector. It works on quad-band GSM network and has 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 capabilities. The 3G version will come soon in the future.

The iPhone equips with a few sensors, to shut down the display and touch screen when the phone is held to the ear, to automatically adjust screen brightness to save power and to let the phone know whether to display in landscape or portrait.

Apart from the hardware, the iPhone is strong on software applications as well. Here is a summary of its features:

• A visual voice-mail feature allows you to skip directly to voice mails you want to hear
• An easy-to-use conference call feature allows you to connect two calls with one touch of the screen
• The text-messaging feature is similar to Apple’s iChat.
• Yahoo! will offer free push e-mail to all iPhone customers (similar to the email system on a BlackBerry).
• The iPhone uses Safari web browser and can view standard web pages, not only WAP websites.
• The iPhone integrates Google Maps for looking up maps and view satellite images
• It also supports Dashboard widgets, including weather and stock widgets
• Of course, it can play photo, music and video.

The iPhone has two versions, the 4GB and the 8GB. In the U.S. the price with 2 year contract is US$499 (NZ$720) and US$599 (NZ$865) respectively. However, it won’t come to Europe until the fourth quarter of 2007 and to Asia in 2008. So I guess it won’t arrive here until the mid of 2008.

For more images of the Apple iPhone, please click the following links:

• Apple iPhone - 2
• Apple iPhone - 3
  
• Apple iPhone - 4
  
• Apple iPhone - 5
  
• Apple iPhone - 6
  
• Apple iPhone - 7
  
• Apple iPhone - 8