From the beginning, up until this morning, I wasn’t that excited to the idea of Apple making a phone. I have lots of music and I doubt the storage of iphone will be bigger than my 80GB ipod. So it’s a phone that plays music, big deal! My current Walkman phone does that too, granted probably never as smooth as the ipod, but it does play music. Then again I rarely use it, since I use my ipod for music, and phone for talk. That being said, since everyone knows how big an Apple fans I am, I will eventually pick an Apple branded phone up just because it’s made by Apple. In sum, unlike my regular reaction after an Apple event, I really didn’t expect anything that would make me go “WOW! OMG!!!” Clearly I understimated Steve’s ability to pleasantly surprise everyone. The rumors have been flying high for so long and no product can ever meet the expectation, and yet the iPhone managed to impress everyone.

The physcial appearance of the iPhone can’t do any justice to this what can be described as a handheld computer rather than a phone. The exterior of it surely looks gorgeous, but ain’t all products from Apple were gorgeous? Who expects anything less? What truly “wow” people is its UI and how easy it makes all the regular phone function become! Believe it or not, there’s still tons of people out there who can not use their phone to make 3-way conference call. (seriously I know many of them!) Or something as simple as holding a call or turn on the speakerphone. Go see the demo now and you can see even grandpa can do it! Visual voicemail is another thing that make me wonder, why no one done this before??

That was just the making call part of it, what truly make me jump around like a kid is the mobile internet part of this device. You can view full html webpage on it, rotate to landscape and zoom in by pinching anywhere the screen with two fingers! Now my friend assured me that zooming has been done before on smartphone, now I have seen my share of smartphones out there and I don’t recall seeing one, certainly not like this! And even if there is one who has this function before, I doubt they have “tab browsing” like this one on mobile phone! Then there’s true html email and ichat-like SMS, wow! (the features in this paragraph is what get me want this device!! true mobile internet on a phone that runs on Wi-fi and EDGE!)

As for the music part of the phone, the feature that i said i would ignore because of my 80GB ipod. Well, I wish and expect the new user interface of this part will appear soon in a full fledge 6Gen ipod. The current simple ipod interface havsn’t change much since 2001 (besides adding colors), this new interface where you can flip to the back of the album art and jump to the songs within that album is exactly what I have been hope for. As for scrolling through Cover Flow just like in iTunes? that’s just a bonus eyes candy but is much welcomed!

There’s so much more features such as Google Maps, widgets, photos, videos that i don’t even have time to talk about. This is not a music phone like most people expected it to be, it’s so much more, it’s a computer that looks like a cell phone!

I certainly want one, but I don’t think I will be getting it yet. First of all it’s with Cingular, a 2 years contract. I heard horror stories, I’ll wait and hope it will go out of exclusive from Cingular. Then being such a revolutionary product, being a first generation first batch of delicious cookie, there must be some bugs that need to iron out as well. So I’ll wait until late late this year or next year to start considering it. But until then, i’ll be drooling over it.

P.S. excellent inside article from Time on the making of iPhone, worth a read!

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