I’ve been waiting for this announcement for months! So, here I am following Mac Rumours Live from 11pm to 12:30am in India, Skyping with a fellow mac addict through the entire key note.

Can I say WOW?!!! Oh my holy good god!!! This phone is light years ahead of the competition. At least five years ahead. iPod, phone, plus internet. It has surpassed my wildest expectations.

Ok, let me be structured –

Interface/Hardware

• The device is one giant screen. One button only – the home button.
• The Blackberry and the Treo have keypads, this has a virtual keypad since the whole thing is interactive.
• Touch screen. But not just touch, multi-touch (in multiple places) and ignores errors. Can scroll through songs, contacts, dial a phone number by using your fingers on the screen.
• Forget your stylus, use what you have – your fingers.
• 3.5-inch screen, high resolution screen, 160ppi.
• Only 11.6mm — thinner than the Q.
• 2 megapixel camera.
• “Accelerator” – automatically switches orientation between horizontal and vertical.
• Knows when you take the phone towards your ear with a “proximity sensor” – what? Wow!
• Ambient light sensor.
• Shrink and enlarge text by “pinching” the screen and expanding your fingers – jeez!
• WiFi and EDGE – with auto-detect (meaning you don’t have to do anything, it just connects)
• 8GB and 4GB. Feels small. Especially for video. And with all your contacts and tunes and video loaded, it could be tight.

OS

• It runs Mac OS X. Forget the horrible Windows Mobile. This is the beautiful os I am used to on my laptop transported onto the phone. Excellent!
• Because it runs Mac OS X, it can do a whole bunch of things amazingly well – photos, contacts, calendar, widgets etc. Amazing photo application.

iPod

• Well, it is the iPod you are used to, but without the click wheel, you use your finger to scroll instead.
• All the usual stuff – album art etc. Same for movies.
• Amazing resolution.
• Speaker.

Phone

• Excellent call interface. Conference calling made easy.
• Visual voicemail. Instead of listening to your messages sequentially, see them all on screen and jump to whichever one you want. Just like email. For this they need carrier integration.
• Can talk and send email at the same time!
• Multiple SMS conversations using the onscreen keyboard. iChat like interface. Predictive text of some sort.
• Great new bluetooth headset that is as sleek as the phone.

Email

• Supports all pop and imap emails.
• Supports Rich HTML.
• PUSH IMAP – hello blackberry, goodbye blackberry. Basically makes every imap email account into a blackberry account. Integration with Yahoo, push IMAP for iPhone customers will be free.

Web

• Safari is the browser.
• Integrated with Google and Yahoo search.
• Integrated Google Maps.
• Location capabilities – it will show you where you are on the Google map, you can then find nearby restaurants, shops etc. Hello geo-targeted local commerce – you are a reality for the first time, my sweet little thing.

Carrier

• Cingular.
• Multi-year exclusive.
• Bad, bad move. Carrier agnostic is the way to go. Own every network, not just the locations Cingular covers well.
• Cingular service is crap.
• Cingular’s pricing plan is through the roof.
• I will not switch to Cingular. Even for this phone. Bad experiences have scarred me.
• Ah well, someone will crack the lock on it pretty quickly and I can then use it on any GSM network.

Price

• 4GB – $499.
• 8GB – $599.
• This is *with* a two-year Cingular contract.
• Hmm… feels high. Will be a barrier for a lot of people. Especially since there is no subsidizing by Cingular like they usually do. The explanation is that this is the subsidized price, but the marketing sell is missing ($599 from Apple, but only $299 with a Cingular contract blah blah).

Overall take

• The product is unbelievable. UN-BEE-LIEVABLE!!! Blown away. Completely. With over 200 patents on this thing, this is a huge leap in innovation.
• The storage size will increase quickly, I would think. The phone is similar in size to a video iPod, so if they can squeeze 30GB and the phone hardware in there, it would be perfection defined.
• The business decision on carrier, I find just plain bad. Cingular, I am sure, put up tons of moolah, but for Apple, the customer experience always comes first… Let’s see how it unfolds.

Those who need to worry

• All phone manufacturers
• RIM (the makers of Blackberry)
• Microsoft, who basically said yesterday that this would be very hard for Apple to pull off. Heh!
• Cingular – since no one is excited it was announced with them. If crappy Cingular service affects iPhone sales (it will), it will be bye bye baby. Contract or no contract.

Apple is SO cool. They have truly redefined the phone. I can’t wait (after someone cracks the Cingular lock on it a week after release).

Congratulations, Apple!

_{Image from: Engadget}