Completely unsubstantiated "market sources" rumors are making the rounds that Apple is already prepping a lower cost iPhone variant. Warning: completely mundane "analysis" follows. According to American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu, "Apple needs to round out its iPhone product line at lower price points (similar to iPod) if it expects to replicate the success of its iPod with sales of 100 million units." Shaw Wu has been right on a couple Apple predictions in the past, but it doesn't take much to guess that Apple is currently at work on, or at least thinking about, a second generation of iPhone. Price drops also seem inevitable, and Shaw's predictions hold few surprises. He claims to have heard of "lower cost iPhone prototypes for release at unspecified future dates" from his sources, and maybe he has, but we're not going to start proclaiming Apple's dominion over all form factors and price points (as entertainingly conceptualized above) just yet.
The iPhone pulls together all the key elements of an iPhone, coupled with a fully-featured mobile phone and a PDA into a single device with a touch screen.
Most touch displays are designed to process a single touch on the screen at a time, and usually need a thin precise point of contact like a stylus.
The iPhone not only does away with the stylus in favour of your fingers, you can use multiple fingers and gesture movements to control the phone and manipulate on-screen information.
For example, place two fingers on the screen and pull them apart – you zoom in on the web page or map that you are looking at. Reverse the process (pinch your fingers together) and you'll zoom out.
Flicking a finger up and down the screen causes the display to scroll, and the display even has the illusion of inertia, with the scroll slowing down to a halt rather than stopping dead after you take your finger off the screen.
Finger-friendly
Making the iPhone's display and layout finger-friendly was essential to make it easy to use. The main menu is very simple – big colourful icons for each of the functions such as Google Maps, the Safari web browser or the email client. Just press an icon once and the application loads.
The on-screen Qwerty keyboard is also surprisingly easy to use, even for people with big hands. Error correction ensures that even if you hit the wrong keys, the iPhone works out the word you were trying to type based on the keys around the letters you hit and a built-in dictionary. It's like T9 for a full keyboard.
The Safari web browser is a big departure for web browsing on a mobile phone. It loads a page in full and displays it just as you would see it on a normal computer screen.
Double-tapping on the area you want to read causes the iPhone to zoom in on the text. Turn the phone on its side and the display will automatically switch from portrait to landscape mode.
For a phone that relies so heavily on data, the lack of 3G isn't as big a problem as you might think. Support for GPRS and the slightly quicker EDGE manages to deliver web pages quickly enough to not make it annoying, while it’s more than enough for email.
A 3G iPhone is widely rumoured to be in the works for this year. Until then, the iPhone in both its 8GB and 16GB forms can be found for as little as £169.
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If you've been wishing for a clamshell-style iPhone, looks like your dreams may be coming true. Unwired View posted these Photoshop-created images of an iPhone flip.
iPhone 3.0 OS Features have finally unveiled. Apple unveiled iPhone 3.0 OS Features yesterday. This is really exciting. Now let’s talk about it.
The software would support automatic alerts of items such as sports results or the arrival of an instant message. The alerts would show up automatically even if the user is in another application.
Apple promised multimedia messaging with the new system, allowing users to send each other photos from the phone. It also announced a peer-to-peer capability that lets users near each other interact with their iPhones for features such as gaming.
The company also unveiled a widely anticipated universal search feature called “spotlight,” which can search key applications on the phone such as email and iPod.
Mobile Phones
