On this day
in 2007, an announcement from the late Apple boss, Steve Jobs changed the
future of smartphones and further cemented Jobs’ position as an innovator. He
unveiled a single device which contained a cell phone, an iPod and an internet
communicator. The device was named an iPhone.
On the 9th of
January, 2007, then Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed at the Macworld conference
2007 a product that was going to be the biggest revenue earner for the American
company in the later years and that was going to change how smartphones are
made.
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| First iPhone. Image: Engadget |
“An iPod, a
phone, an internet mobile communicator… these are not three separate devices!”
Steve Jobs said during the Macworld conference. “And we are calling it iPhone!”
“Today Apple
is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is…”
“Before we
get into it, let me talk about a category of things … the most advanced phones
are called smartphones. They typically involve a phone, have plastic little
keyboards on them, the problem is they’re not so smart and they’re not so easy
to use. If you make a biz school 101 graph, cell phones are at the bottom …
smartphones are a little smarter, but they are harder to use.”
“We don’t
want to make either one of these things – we want to make a leapfrog product,
smart and easy to use. This is what iPhone is.”
“The problem
is really in the bottom 40% -- keyboards that are there whether you need them
or not. They have control buttons that are fixed in plastic. Every app wants a
different button. You can’t add new buttons. How do you solve this problem? We
solved this problem – we solved it in computers 20 years ago. A bitmap screen
that can display anything we want – with a pointing device.”
“So how are
we going to take this to a mobile device? Get rid of all the buttons, and just
make a giant screen. So how are we going to communicate? We’re going to use a
stylus – no. who wants a stylus?? Yuck!”
“So let’s not
use a stylus, we’re going to use the best pointing device in the world – our fingers.
We have invented a new technology called multi-touch. It works like magic, you
don’t need a stylus, far more accurate than any interface ever shipped, it
ignores touches, multi-finger gestures, and boy we have patented it!”
“We have been
very lucky to have brought a few revolutionary user interfaces to the market –
the mouse, the click wheel, and now Multi-Touch. Each has made possible a
revolutionary product, the Mac, the iPod, and now the iPhone.”
The first
iPhone came with a 3.5-inch screen, a 160 ppi (pixels per inch) and a 320 ×
480 pixel resolution. It had a 2 megapixels camera, a Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
network, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0.
It had a battery
life of 5 hours talk time and 16 hours of audio playback. It had OS X running
on it. It was equipped 128MB of RAM and a 412MHz processor.
4GB version
of the first iPhone was priced at $499 while the 8GB version was priced at
$599. It had dimensions of 115mm × 61mm × 11.6mm and a weight of 135g.
It was first
released on the 29th of June, 2007 and about 6.1 million units of the phone were
sold.
The making of
iPhone together with iPad which was later introduced by Apple lifted the Cupertino
Company to the top in the world. Apple through these revolutionary products
became the most valuable company in the world and still occupies that position
till date.
Apple changed
the face of smartphones with innovation and toady was the day it started 7 years
ago, with an announcement from a great genius, Steve Jobs.
Is there
anything that beat innovation in the technology industry?
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The first iPhone was announced exactly 7 years ago