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Entering the Top “Five” Reasons to Buy iPhone

Mon, Jun 25, 2007 | by Stéphane Dion

iPhone News

Iphone_multitouch

The Buy iPhone Contest gets in the final AT&T sprint, as we are five days from iPhone launch and we are posting Reason #5 of our “Top Ten Reasons To Buy iPhone CONTEST”.

Here’s how to participate: Each day, through June 29th inclusively, we will be adding one item to the list of reasons why you should buy an iPhone. Take note: This is an interactive game. To participate in the contest, you must tell us, as part of the comments, why we should all buy iPhone or why you agree or disagree with what we have posted.  Join in, and be creative!

If you have a blog, you can also write about it on your site. If you want to, you can link back to this post to let your readers know that you participated in this contest. But don’t forget to add a link to your blog in the comments section, this way, we can also visit your site. Prizes include a $100 Apple Store certificate and Belkin iPhone cases.

Have you ever experienced a multi-touch screen before? The experience of gesture recognition is amazing and will change the way we make user interfaces forever.

TOP TEN REASONS TO BUY iPHONE

REASON #5: MULTI-TOUCH SCREEN

Apple says iPhone features the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse. Well, that may be over exaggeration, but the screen is a major breakthrough for portable devices.

It’s an entirely new interface based on a large multi-touch display and innovative new software that lets you control everything – using only your fingers. So you can glide through albums with Cover Flow, flip through photos and email them with a touch, or zoom in and out on a section of a web page — all by simply using iPhone’s multi-touch display.

In a few years from now, this won’t even be considered a feature, but a bare minimum any mobile phone user interface should have. However, for now, it’s part of the Top 5 Reasons to buy iPhone. How do you feel about that?

REASON #6: COOL SENSORS ON BOARD

Accelerometer, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor
When we read these words, it’s far from obvious that we are talking
about a mobile phone here. But we do – and they make iPhone an
extremely innovative product!

Here’s what they are used for:

The accelerometer detects when you rotate the device from portrait
to landscape. It automatically changes the contents of the display, so
you immediately see the entire width of a web page or a photo in its
proper landscape aspect ratio. Great? No, amazing!

While talking on the phone, iPhone screen
will be in contact with your ear and cheek, to avoid inadvertent
touches until iPhone is moved away, a proximity sensor detects when
you lift iPhone to your ear and immediately turns off the display. This
will also save power.

The ambient light sensor automatically adjusts the display’s
brightness to the appropriate level for the current ambient light,
thereby enhancing the user experience and saving power at the same time.

REASON #7: INTERNET OVER WI-FI

Internet over Wi-Fi
on a cellphone is a major breakthrough. Until now, network operators have done everything they could to avoid public Wi-Fi networks to work with mobile phones. The reason is simple; when you use a public Wi-Fi network
you are not using the operator’s bandwidth. Increasing the use of their
network is of course key for network operators. Their future depends on
it.

AT&T and Apple are opening a can of worms with this feature and
we are so happy about it. Besides the (eventual) lower costs for data,
the increase of performance will be a knockoff! But don’t get to
excited here, an unlimited data plan will certainly be mandatory for
the iPhone. Everything has a price!

REASON #8: SAFARI AND THIRD PARTY APPLICATIONS

With a full scale Safari browser built-in, Apple says iPhone let
us see any web page the way it was designed to be seen, then easily
zoom in by simply tapping on the multi-touch display with a finger.

Ok, a few things like Flash and JavaScript are still missing. But this is a lot better than what we had until now.

After the initial announcement disappointment, the enthusiasm created by the abundance of third party applications made for the iPhone is now a total blast. In six months to a year from now, hundreds of well designed applications will complement iPhone.

Being limited to the browser has its downsides. Like not being able
to fully use iPhone resources, having to reload the application
from the internet and not being able to store anything on iPhone,
to name a few. But it also makes good applications easier and faster to
write. This also opens the market for a broader group of programmers
since html and Ajax already enjoy great communities compared to what a
proprietary SDK could have had.

REASON #9: YOUTUBE PLAYER AVAILABLE ON THE HOME SCREEN

iPhone has a special YouTube player that you can launch right from
the home screen. So now you can access and browse YouTube videos
wherever you go. And when you find a video you want to send your
friends, iPhone can even create an email with the link in it for you.

Some of you think this is useless and others think it’s amazing but
it sure is something we never had before on our cell phone or portable
device. That’s why the Youtube player makes the Top Ten.

REASON #10: VISUAL VOICE MAIL

You should buy iPhone because of the Visual Voice Mail feature.
With iPhone, Apple brings many new concepts to the mobile phone
world, but the "Visual Voice Mail" will sure make Apple’s iPhone the
leader in innovation from day one.

According to Apple, iPhone Visual Voice Mail is an industry
first! The feature allows you to go directly to any of your messages,
without listening to the prior messages. So you can quickly select the
messages that are most important to you. Isn’t that great? You won’t
have to listen to "You have 5 new messages" or "Press 7 to delete this
message" anymore. "Plop Plop, fizz fizz, Oh what a relief it is!"

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3 Comments For This Post

  1. Rik Kaplan Says:

    I like (agree with) your statement that the multi-touch display will eventually become a standard feature without much extra attention warranted.

    In the early days of electronic music, when keyboard controllers were first employed they were monophonic. Moog & Arp (et al) use required multitracking for big projects. Next, came the addition of one extra note and we all went crazy over being able to play 2 notes at once. Later on came substantial polyphony (aw with the Seq Ckt Prophet 5) and chordal work became the norme (just plain expected) forevermore (cue: Casio and so forth).

    Also, I have been using a touchscreen smartphone (Sony Ericsson P910) for years. All other P800/P900 users I know had removed the supplied keypad and gone with virtual keyboard immediately upon purchase. I expect the IPhone multi-touch keyboard to be a subtle (in regard to user attention) yet enormously potent (creativety-wise) evolution in man-machine interface.

    Device operators can now jump from monophonic prehistoric chanters to polyphonic post-moderne complex orchestration. And a Caveman can do it!
    [ with a suitable IP contract, of course]

  2. R.J. Ratliff Says:

    I just pray that I do not have to break out the old stylus. Will they even work! In all seriousness, I have great expectations and faith in Apples ability to have fully developed this technology. The “new” Apple would not put out a product that they were not satisfied with themselves, I hope.

  3. Chris Says:

    I think the multi-touch screen will be big. Assuming the navigation is intuitive. I’ve noticed that I hardly ever grab the stylist out of my Treo any more because in the amount of time it took me to grab it, I could have easily used the directional navigator to get what I wanted. I think with the bigger screen on the iPhone and with, what looks to be, a great way to navigate around the phone, that the multi-touch will become a standard interface in the future.