Click to View

After speaking a bit about iTunes and movies, Zune as a competitor to the iPod, and Apple TV - the wireless device introduced in September to connect digital media to a TV - Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the gadget everyone has been waiting years for during his keynote address at the 2007 Macworld conference in San Francisco.

Apple is going to sell a smartphone.

Yes, the iPhone is now no longer the subject of rumor, but a reality. And that's correct, you heard me right, Apple is calling its hybrid-handset the iPhone after all.

According to Jobs, the iPhone, which is black on the front and silver on the back, merges three gadgets into one: a mobile phone, Internet communications device, and iPod with touch controls.

The quad-band GSM/EDGE smartphone includes a 3.5-inch wide touchscreen display and is supposed to be only 11.6 millimeters thick; thinner than the slimmest of nearly all other smartphones. Specs include 4 GB or 8 GB of storage, a petite home button, a 2 megapixel camera on the back, speaker, mic and iPod dock connector on the bottom, and a ring/silent switch and volume controls on one side.

It also has a 3.5mm headset jack and a SIM card tray, of course. A light sensor controls screen brightness to save power, a proximity sensor tells the iPhone turn off the touchscreen when you bring it to your ear, and an accellerometer automatically switches the iPhone to portrait or landscape mode, depending on how you're holding the device.

3G-enabled phones are expected for the future. But the iPhone does currently offer Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0, with the ability to switch from a cellular call to a WLAN automatically.

Incredibly, the iPhone runs on Mac OS X. You're reading this correctly, Apple's desktop computer platform.

"Why would we run such a sophisticated operating system on a mobile device? It's got everything we need. It's got multitasking, networking, power management, awesome security and the right apps. It's got all the stuff we want,” Jobs emphasized. "And it's built right in to iPhone. And has let us create desktop-class applications and networking.

With Mac OS X, Apple can provide a much better platform for accessing the Internet and e-mail wirelessly than with traditional smartphone and cell phones, which Jobs described as providing "the baby Internet."

"We want to do a leapfrog product that's way smarter than these phones and much easier to use. So we're going to reinvent the phone," Jobs stated.

So, unlike many of today's most popular smartphones (e.g. the RIM BlackBerry, Motorola Q, Palm Treo, and Nokia E62), Apple chose not to go with keyboard or even stylus input, but rather invented a new technology the company is calling Multitouch. iPhone includes a full QWERTY soft-keyboard

Multitouch, patented by Apple (along with over 200 other patents for technologies that went into the iPhone), places the emphasis of input and navigation squarely on a users’ fingers; and it is, according to Jobs, much more accurate than a regular touch display - with support for multi-finger gestures and the ability to ignore inadvertent touches.

A feature called Visual Voicemail lets users look at a listing of their voicemails, decide which messages to listen to, then go directly to those messages without listening to the prior messages.

Additional features include the ability to automatically merge calls to create a conference call, iChat-like text messaging, zoom in and out of pictures, PC and Mac synchronization, the Safari Web browser, HTML e-mail support, Yahoo!-based push e-mail, and the ability to handle Mac OS Dashboard widgets.

The iPhone syncs media (pictures, video, music, etc.) just like an iPod. Simply attach it to your computer and the files transfer automatically. The same goes for e-mail, contact information, calendar, notes, bookmarks and most other digital content on your desktop.

Cover Flow (see below), available on an iPod for the first time, enables users to browse their music library by album cover artwork.

A 4 GB edition of the iPhone is slated to cost $499, while an 8 GB model will sell for $100 more.

Jobs said Apple plans to release the iPhone this June in the U.S. (they’re still waiting for FCC approval, but wanted to get the phone introduced before an inadvertent government leak), Europe in the fourth quarter and Asia sometime next year.

It will be available directly from Cingular, Apple's exclusive carrier-partner for the iPhone in this country, and Apple.

Apple's goal is to capture 1 percent of what is today a 957 million unit cell phone market in 2008, which would net them about 10 million iPhones shipped.

And since the company is now so much more than a computer vendor, Jobs said from this day forward Apple has dropped Computer from its name. The company is now simply called. Apple, Inc.