http://www.apple.com/iphone/

Just announced at MacWorld. Steve Jobs describes the iPhone as “having your life in your pocket”. The phone will be available in two models, 4GB and 8GB priced at $499 and $599 respectively, and will ship to the US in June of this year. Europe will get the phone in the fourth quarter, while Asia will wait till 2008.

Over 200 patents were filed for the inventions in the iPhone, which they intend to vigorously protect. The phone hopes to be a smartphone, music player, camera and video player all in one. The screen will have 160 pixels per inch, the phone will run OSX, and only has one button. The rest of the navigation is controlled by the touch screen display.

The phone also features a 2 megapixel camera, and is only 11.6mm thick. It can differentiate between the user holding it landscape or portrait, and has an ambient light sensor adjusting its brightness dependent on what environment you are in. Google and Yahoo are on board offering mapping and mail services too.

Having viewed the demos on the above website, it looks nice but I'm not entirely convinced about this touch-screen interface. Whilst it would be fantastic for navigation, it looks like inputting SMS and numbers would be a royal pain in the butt. I've had a touchscreen phone before (granted it was a Motorola) and that sucked big time. So clumsy. The other related issue would be the lack of ability to feel keys, which means you have to look at the screen to input everything. Thus, you can't sms or dial something whilst on the move without having to shift your focus to the phone.

But having said that, plenty of people seem happy with their O2 touch-screen PDA-phone devices. The iPhone looks to be the Apple's take on a simplistic PDA-phone.