Apple's evolution

iPhone

iPhone, the latest release from apple was released last week ... and it was crazy ! People were hanging out in line since monday to get it ! The buildup was a lesson in creating hype by arguably one of the best showman today - Steve Jobs.

Just a bit of history for people who do not know much or are not into tech as deep as me :)

Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniac. It was a giddy climb to stardom and Steve was in his time the worlds youngest billionare. Board politics reared its ugly head, and he was removed from apple. In the interim he went on to make Pixar - the company which redefined animation movies with Toy Story. Then, in the later part of the 90s Steve was back as CEO of Apple, and apple never looked back. ( If you are interested, read iCon which is on Steve Jobs)

Together with designer Jonathan Ive, the products from apple just went on becoming better and better - objects of desire so to say. Diverging from the desktop business which was seeing a revival of the macOS, apple launched a revolution in the form of the iPod. Frankly, at that time , and even today, there are many mp3 players which have more features, but what the iPod did was beat everyone on usability. Just about anybody could use it. With its simple white slim box design it became a hit. Apple's attention to detail are just too good.

Then about a couple of years back, rumors about an apple phone started surfacing. In Jan this year, Steve Jobs demoed the phone for the first time to an ecstatic audience and showed the world the iPhone. It was finally relesed on the last friday of June to an expectant audience worldwide, but only in the USA.

And no, you cannot use it here in India.

Plz dont do this to your phone!

People first in line became heroes after getting the iPhone. You can get hundreds of blogs/pics of those now on the net. However, what facinated me was a couple of links of opening up the phone to see what is inside. $500 up in smoke. Check out the links below :

• Apple's iPhone disected : We did it so you did not have to - Anand Tech
• iPhone Take-Apart - Think Secret

The amazing compactness achieved is really remarkable. I have never designed hardware, but since most companies do not get near to this level of compactness, I think that its ok ;-)

So, what does the iPhone do ?

Most questions can be answered ont he iPhone website. Check out the videos there if you can, words cannot describe what the videos can. However, a brief summary of important points :

• Touch screen with multi touch. Basically you use your fingers to type and flick the pages.
  
• Take pics with a 2MP camera. you can then zoom in and zoom out using two fingers. As the distance increases between the fingers, it zooms in. Aaah !
  
• 4GB and 8GB memory to play your songs. Did I mention , the iPhone is the best iPod till date ?
  
• Fully capeable internet browser. The palm treo i use is not good with full html.
  

But if you are gearing up for buying it right now, I suggest you dont. Here's the reasons :

• Locked SIM with AT&T . Which means I cannot open it up and replace the SIM with my Airtel/Hutch SIM. If you check the take apart pics from AnandTech or ThinkSecret you will notice that there is no way to open the phone apart from destroying it totally. I think interchangeable sims will be available in the future (EU release end of 07, rest of world release mid 08).
• No Edge. Believe me , full html on a slow gprs connection is quite frustrating.
  
• Cannot add any other applications. This is a bummer. What it means is that if there is a cool application available, you cannot install it.
  
• Limited storage space. 4GB is small for music and videos. I have a feeling the storage is going to explod pretty soon to higher nos. Anything less than 20GB is not worth it.
  
• No IM.
  

Following is an interesting photofeature of the evolution of apple through the times ! Click on link below to see it in full.

Apple Evolution