Yep, iPhone is here...

Not unexpected, Apple unveiled its new "iPhone" at MacWorld this week... In Apple's words not a single device but three revolutionary products in one: a mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls and a 'breakthrough' Internet communications device. It is also a camera and, at a push, a PDA. But in the UK you will have to wait until the end of the year to get your hands on one.

Looking like a portable display with Apple's typically elegant design, the iPhone is based around a new user interface driven entirely by the fingers, using the company's innovative Multi-touch technology. This includes gestures that allow the user, for example, to enlarge or reduce a picture by simply 'pinching' it on the screen

It provides a quad-band GSM telephone, 802,11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and EDGE technology for wireless data handling; in fact there is scarcely a way that it cannot communicate, given that it also has USB 2 on board.

In phone mode, the iPhone lets the user make a call by pointing at a name or number in the contact list, which is itself automatically synced with address book information on your computer or from an Internet service such as Yahoo! Users can create a favourites list for your most frequently made calls and merge calls together with a single 'click' to create conference calls.

The phone is the first to let users view a list of their voicemails and select which to listen to, in effect working like email. There are also SMS text messages with a full QWERTY virtual keyboard, which appears only as it is needed and includes predictive technology.

When you lift the phone to your ear - if you are not using the optional compact Bluetooth headset - a built-in proximity sensor immediately turns off the display to save power and prevent inadvertent touches until the iPhone is moved away. And rather than cutting out, any music that is playing fades to silence.

As an enhanced iPod nano - with 4GB or 8GB of memory - the iPhone purports to let the user 'touch' their music, by scrolling through a list of songs, or flipping album covers, with their fingers.

The display also lets you view widescreen video and photos. Turning the iPhone though 90 degrees automatically rotates the screen image, so that images cane be viewed in landscape or portrait as necessary. Pictures can be uploaded by and synced with a computer, and the iPhone includes a photo management application that Apple believes is far beyond anything else on offer on current mobile phones. And the integrated light sensor automatically adjusts the display's brightness to the appropriate level for the current ambient light, to improve image clarity and save on battery juice.

As an Internet communicator, the iPhone offers a rich HTML email client which fetches your email in the background from most POP3 or IMAP mail services and displays photos and graphics right along with the text. The iPhone is fully multi-tasking, so you can be reading a Web page while downloading your email in the background.

Yahoo! Mail, the world's largest email service with over 250 million users, is offering a new free 'push' IMAP email service - similar to the BlackBerry's - to all iPhone users, but the handset will also work with most industry-standard IMAP and POP-based email services, such as Apple's .Mac, Microsoft Exchange, AOL and Gmail.

The Safari-style Web browser displays Web pages as they were designed, letting the user zoom in to expand any section by simply tapping on iPhone's display. Users can surf the Web over Wi-Fi or EDGE and can automatically sync their bookmarks from their PC or Mac. The browser includes Google Search and Yahoo! Search as well as Google Maps to view maps, satellite images, traffic information and get directions.

'iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,' said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. 'We are all born with the ultimate pointing device - our fingers - and iPhone uses them to create the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse.'

iPhone will be available in the US in June 2007, Europe in late 2007, and Asia in 2008, in a 4GB model for $499 and an 8GB model for $599, and will work with either a PC running Windows 2000 or XP Home or Professional or Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later.

In the US it will be available exclusively through the Cingular network and the price will include a two-year contract.