The iPhone was first introduced by Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007 at the Macworld exhibition in San Francisco. After launching iPhone, Apple's shares were soaring. Moreover, because of the works on the iPhone, the launch of the operating system Mac OS X v10.5 was postponed from June 11, until October 26.



The innovative solution in the iPhone was to remove the traditional keyboard; instead, there is a touch screen supported by the Multi-Touch technology. No stylus is needed; everything is operated with the use of a finger or multiple fingers. An additional novelty is the display that turns off when brought near the ear (proximity sensor) and a 3.5 in display, with 320 x 480 pixels definition, that automatically adjust the screen to the device's orientation (vertical - horizontal). iPhone enables listening to music (MP3 files), watching videos in mpeg format and taking photos with a 2.0 megapixel camera. Similarly to iPods, songs and videos are downloaded directly from iTune Store. The iPhone enables wireless access to the Internet via Wi-Fi and surfing the World Wide Web pages via Safari browser.

On June 28, a day before the launch, Steve Job announced that every full-time and part-time employees of Apple, working at least one year for the company, would get an iPhone for free. Devices will be distributed in July 2007 when the demand falls. The iPhone was launched on June 29, 2007 in two versions - 4GB flash memory for 499$ and 8GB flash memory for 599$. In addition, during the purchase of the device one has to conclude a two-year subscription contract with AT&T. However, when the iPhone's SIM Lock security was unlocked, its price fell rapidly to 399$ for 8GB flash memory. Already a few days before the launch long queues were formed in front of Apple and AT&T networks' showrooms. Greg Packer was the first in a queue to a shop in New York; he had been waiting around 10 hours starting from Monday morning till Friday's evening. A modified version of operating system Mac OS X has been used in the iPhone.

For the first two years iPhone will be available in the USA only in AT&T Mobility network. Except for the USA, the Apple Inc. has concluded contracts with the following networks:

* Germany: Deutsche Telekom

* France: Orange

* Great Britain: O2

* Canada: Rogers (launch scheduled at January 18, 2008)

Touch screen

The iPhone has a 3.5 inches (8.9 cm) liquid crystal display (320 x 480 pixels) HVGA, acting as a touch screen that has been created for the use with one finger or multiple fingers. No stylus is needed nor can it be used, since the touch screen is not compatible with it. For the text input, a virtual keyboard appears on the touch screen, but it disappears when not used. Moreover, the iPhoone has a built-in spell-checker, predictive word capabilities and a dynamic dictionary that retains new words. The predictive words capabilities have been integrated with the keyboard so that the user does not have to be perfectly accurate when typing - unwitting touch of the edges of the nearby letters on the keyboard will be corrected when possible.

Scrolling through the long lists works on the basis of 'a rotating wheel'. Sliding a finger over the screen, imitating wheel spinning, spins the list that would whirl and then gradually stops.

The photos and web pages magnification is an example of a multi-touch technology. In order to zoom photos or a web page one has to place two fingers in the middle of the screen and spread them across diagonally, as if actually stretching the image.

The touch screen responds to three sensors:

* proximity sensor - blanks the screen and shuts off the touch screen when the iPhone is brought near the face, in order to prevent accidental service through the user's ear or face, and to save battery power.

* light sensor - adjusts the display brightness to outer conditions, serves better screen visibility and saves battery power.

* accelerometer - adjusts the display (vertical - horizontal) to the device's orientation, measuring its movement speed.

The iPhone has only four mechanical buttons - home button (back to the main menu), sleep/ wake (sleep mode/ return to work), volume up/ down (turning up/ down the volume), ringer on/off (turning on/ off the sound)

Copyright (c) 2008 Adam Nowak