Apple Unveils iPhone, Partners with Cingular, Google, Yahoo!

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the long awaited iPhone — combining a GSM phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, digital camera, WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities and Internet communications, including email, web browsing, searching and maps. Apple also announced a multi-year partnership with Cingular — now part of AT&T — which will offer the iPhone starting in June for $599.

“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.”

Key features include:

• a quad-band GSM phone which also features EDGE and Wi-Fi
• a 3.5-inch widescreen display with soft controls rather than fixed buttons
• three built-in sensors — an accelerometer that detects when the user has rotated the device from portrait to landscape; a proximity sensor that detects when you lift iPhone to your ear and immediately turns off the display to save power and prevent inadvertent touches; and an ambient light sensor that automatically enhance the user experience and extend battery life.
• an SMS application with a full QWERTY soft keyboard to easily send and receive SMS messages in multiple sessions.
• a 2 megapixel camera and a photo management application that lets users organize and email photos
• a widescreen iPod with touch controls
• support for most POP3 or IMAP mail services
• Yahoo! will offer a new free “push” IMAP email service to all iPhone users that automatically pushes new email to a user’s iPhone.
• a Safari web browser that shows web pages in their native format and also includes built-in Google Search and Yahoo! Search
• Google Maps
• 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.

http://www.apple.com