Apple inc. has become synonymous with bleeding edge design, and innovative technologies. It comes as no surprise that their latest phone the iPhone has sent competition scampering in search of something that comes even close to the iPhone. The first thing that anyone will notice about the iPhone is that it is completely devoid of any kind of number keys, although it might not be the first phone to do so, but the iPhone is the most advanced phone available that has a purely touch screen based interface.

The first impression that the iPhone makes is that of a minimalist device, no number keys, no answer or cancel key nothing! Just a single navigation joystick and that is it. This is one of the biggest reasons why the iPhone is considered the beautiful device it is, no matter how stylish phone manufacturers try to make their phone, the keypad is always the bottleneck, trust Apple inc. to get rid of the keypad all together. The similar looking HTC touch is the closest competition to the iPhone, it fails to make the impression that the Apple iPhone makes.

A more detailed look at the iPhone reveals a standard 3.5 mm industry jack for earphones on one side, the standard volume up and down button keys, a home key button to switch the navigation to the home view and a ringer on off button (its amazing how many phones don't have this button). So in general the iPhone is truly a minimalist device when it comes to the number of input buttons.

Where the iPhone is revolutionary is the triple sensors it has built into it, the first sensor is a light sensor which automatically adjusts the brightness of the display screen according to the surrounding light, impressive to say the least. The second sensor is a new innovation; the sensor is a proximity sensor that automatically disables the touch screen while a user is speaking on the phone (i.e. when his ear is pressed up against the speaker of the phone). The final sensor is the piece de resistance, the orientation sensor senses the tilt of the phone (quite literally), and once a user flips the phone's orientation it automatically adjusts the display to that orientation.

There are however some downsides to the iPhone that have disappointed some users, but are typical of Apple, for one there is no way to customize the look and feel of the phone by using themes, and the look of the phone is sometimes inconsistent across various applications. However users are expecting this to change in future releases of the iPhone. Also the 3.5 mm headset jack is housed deep in the casing of the phone, and some headphones just don't fit; however the quality of the headphones provided with the iPhone makes up for this deficiency. As is the case with all new phones and technologies, there will be some bugs and glitches that will come up from time to time but these should in no way hinder the impressive sales and penetration the Apple iPhone is expected to have.

In addition to being a quality PDA, the iPhone is also a 4GB iPod; the newer versions of the iPhone are now being shipped out in optional 8 GB versions as well. Apart from playing the usual music formats, the iPhone impressively manages many video formats. In addition to the boring visual plugins, the iPhone also supports browsing of music by album art. So instead of just clicking on the name of an album, a user can actually ?flip? through the various albums and choose the one by simply clicking on it (another first from Apple?). All in all the iPhone does pretty much everything a video iPod can do. However the only limitation that the iPhone has when compared to the iPod is space, the iPod ships in 80GB storage also, and the maximum the iPhone has is 8GB, but considering that it is after all a phone, and not meant to be a complete replacement to an iPod, the iPhone does a very good job.