The iPhone is here

So it’s offi­cial: Apple now is a phone man­u­fac­turer. With the announce­ment of the Apple iPhone, we can now finally assess that new prod­uct and I have to say, color me impressed. The com­pany has man­aged to over­come a lot of the prob­lems sur­round­ing exist­ing mobile phones and cre­ated a device that is close to what geeks like myself want: 2 megapixel cam­era, MP3 player, video player, phone with inte­grated address book, cal­en­dar, email, web browser, SMS, notepad, google maps, and sup­port for other wid­gets, which makes the whole plat­form more extensible.

It’s a very smart move on the part of Apple, which high­lighted the change in the way the com­pany is oper­at­ing by chang­ing its name from Apple Com­puter, Inc. to Apple, Inc. , reflect­ing the fact that they are no longer just a com­puter company.There were a few inter­est­ing items of inter­est, though.

For starters, no men­tion of how the phone will sync up with a com­puter. Are we to assume that it’s Mac Only or will it syn­chro­nize with com­put­ers run­ning Win­dows too? If so, does that mean that a new set of appli­ca­tions will be avail­able to Win­dows users to sync their address book, cal­en­dar and email with sys­tems like Out­look or will the device require to man­age those things specif­i­cally using Apple appli­ca­tions on Windows?

The other thing that was inter­est­ing is the announce­ment that the phone will run on quad-band GSM and will be using EDGE net­work. This means that the phone will get decent but not great data ser­vice. Per­fect for email and light web brows­ing but not quite fast enough for video stream­ing. How­ever, the intro­duc­tion of WiFi in the device, which many other com­pa­nies have avoided for fear of los­ing bat­tery capac­ity, could take care of that.

The other inter­est­ing thing is that the oper­at­ing sys­tem on this device is OSX. This seems to point out to two pos­si­ble issues: First, what does that mean for Por­talPlayer, which has tra­di­tion­ally pro­vided Apple with the oper­at­ing sys­tem (embed­ded on a chip) for the iPod? The sec­ond ques­tion is what does it mean in gen­eral: What Apple has intro­duced is basi­cally a mac in a small form fac­tor, which could eas­ily com­pete with the UMPC spec­i­fi­ca­tions intro­duced by Microsoft. It’s pretty clear that Apple has a lot of plans in the future for that device but they didn’t say much about the sig­nif­i­cance of OSX, pro­vid­ing it almost as an aside (and what does it mean for the next ver­sion of OSX, which was not men­tioned dur­ing this keynote at all, a sur­pris­ing omis­sion in itself.)

Who loses?

Judg­ing from the reac­tion on the stock mar­ket, it’s pretty obvi­ous to see who loses: Palm (mak­ers of the Treo), RIM (mak­ers of the Black­berry), and Motorola and Nokia will obvi­ously not be thrilled with the entrance of Apple in this mar­ket. The exclu­sive deal with AT&T (ooops, sorry, Cin­gu­lar) will also have a neg­a­tive impact on Ver­i­zon, Sprint, and T-mobile as Ver­i­zon will see a num­ber of users switch­ing to them in order to get their hands on this device (in infor­mal dis­cus­sion with a num­ber of fel­low geeks, the dis­ad­van­tages of mov­ing to Cin­gu­lar were far out­weighted by the cool­ness of this device).

Let’s take a quick look at specs and see how the dif­fer­ence devices fare against this new entrant:

So look­ing at it, this phone is pretty expen­sive (you pay for the Apple pre­mium) but packs a lot more fea­tures than other phones in the same cat­e­gory. It’s got a bet­ter cam­era, more mem­ory and a larger screen as well as WiFi. It’s talk time (for the cat­e­gory) is actu­ally pretty good (only bested by Nokia’s E-62) and it is a lit­tle heav­ier than the com­pe­ti­tion. For a first entry in the mar­ket, I’d say that Apple has a win­ner on its hands.