Apple launched its take on the smart phone, a sleek device with a large screen that combines a phone, an iPod and instant messaging in a new push beyond computers.
Apple's iPhone has a single button and a 3.5-inch (9-cm) touch screen to navigate between playing songs and videos, displaying pictures, typing instant messages, or even making phone calls. The iPhone bears little resemblance to any other phone. It has just one pushbutton. Nearly everything else is controlled by touching icons that appear on the phone's large video screen.
The iPhone is thinner than some of the cellphone industry's sleekest devices, such as Motorola Inc.'s RAZR. It will cost $499 to $599 when it debuts in the United States, and is expected to hit Europe in the fourth quarter and Asia in 2008.
The iPhone is 11.6-millimeters (0.5-inches) thick, has five hours of continuous talk time and 15 hours for playing music, and includes a camera. It runs Apple's OS X operating system, has the Safari browser for Web access and e-mail functions that can handle graphics and work with external services.
The iPhone can connect to the Internet wirelessly via Wi-Fi and has Bluetooth, a short-range wireless technology that supports wireless headsets or links to devices like printers. The phone has a 2-megapixel camera and is designed to share information with Windows or Macintosh computers -- not only phone numbers, but photos, videos, and of course music, and it has built-in WiFi wireless networking . The iPhone's built-in browser is capable of showing Web pages just as they appear on a standard computer monitor. To zoom in on a particular part of the page, the user just taps it with a finger.
In 2008, Apple plans to sell 10 million iPhones, representing roughly 1 percent of the current annual mobile phone market of 1 billion units a year. Apple has now sold 70 million iPods and consumers have bought more than 2 billion songs for about 99 cents each on iTunes. More than 220 TV shows are also available on iTunes.
