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  BlackBerryToday > News > Potential iPhone Ship Date Revealed

Potential iPhone Ship Date Revealed

By James Alan Miller
April 2, 2007

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When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in January, at Macworld, the most he would say about when AT&T (formally Cingular) would introduce the device was June. According to a recent leak from an AT&T customer service manager to CNET News.com, the exact date will be Monday June 11th, which happens to be the day of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference starts. The conference runs through the 15th.

Here's what AT&T will start offering exclusively on June 11th, should the leak be accurate:

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.

It's a quad-band GSM/EDGE ultra high-end feature phone (some say it isn't a smartphone because it doesn't allow for third-party application development) that includes a 3.5-inch wide touch-screen display and is only 11.6 millimeters. 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.

There's a a3.5mm 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 touch screen 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.

The iPhone, which runs a slimmed down version of Mac OS X, includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0, with the ability to switch from a cellular call to a WLAN automatically. 3G-enabled iPhones are expected for the future.

Unlike with 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 also 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//

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, 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 with a 2-year contract, while an 8 GB model will sell for $100 more.

Apple's high margins on the device leave plenty of room for prices to be lowered over time. According to market research firm iSuppli, there's a gross profit margin of nearly 50 percent with each iPhone. This means for every 4 GB iPhone sold, Apple could net approximately $253, and with the 8 GB model $318.

The company'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.

A Harvard Business School professor reported earlier this month that the attention the iPhone has thus far received adds up to $400 million worth of free publicity.



Related Links:

  • AT&T COO’s First Dance with iPhone a Public Performance
  • iPhone Generates $400 Million in Free Publicity for Apple
  • Palm Picks Up Former Apple Software Engineer
  • Cisco Disconnects From iPhone Lawsuit
  • Cingular Surges on Subscriber Rush

     
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