MacWorld San Francisco

Articles: Event Coverage: CES 2007

Pre-CES | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Extended Coverage

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Anthony Fiti
Brian

Jan. 9, 2007

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MacWorld San Francisco

Even though we're all here at CES reporting on new gadgets and gizmos, I took some time out to go over today's events at MacWorld San Francisco.

The first announcement was the addition of Paramount Studios (which is owned by Viacom) as a new partner in the movie selling business. Paramount Pictures is responsible for titles like the upcoming Transformer movie, the Mission Impossible series and the Star Trek movies. Steve himself mentioned that as of today all the Star Trek movies will be available on iTunes. What will be interesting is if Paramount Studio's child company Dreamworks will have movies available - they produced Shrek and Madagascar.

Next is the Apple TV device. It connects to your TV via HDMI, component or composite, and connects to your network with either hardwire Ethernet or WiFi - B, G and even N. It also contains a 40GB HD to store music, movies and pictures. You can view your media from the HD synchronized from one computer, or you can stream from up to 5 computers. The device still has the same functionality and menu system that was demonstrated last September. The price will be $299 and it will be available in February, but Apple.com will start selling the device today through their online store.

Now we get to the meat of the event. The big new product from Apple. The iPhone. No, not the Linksys/Cisco iPhone, Apple's iPhone. Touch controls, designed to be three devices in one - a true widescreen iPod, cellular phone, and Internet communicator all running on top of OS X.

The unit is 11.7mm thick and sports a 3.5" widescreen display, and has an iPod connector on the bottom to dock the unit. The cellphone portion of the device is quad band phone that supports GSM and EDGE, plus WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0. The battery life is stated to be 5 hours of talk/browse time, at 16 hours of music only time.

It syncs with iTunes, iCal, iPhoto, and other applications to pull over your media (music, movies, tv shows), email, calendar, contact list, etc. You get Yahoo push IMAP (the same type of technology found in Blackberry phones to push email to the phone), Google Maps with integrated GPS location so it knows where you are, widgets (just like in OS X) like stock ticker, weather forecasts, etc.

You navigate around the device by moving your fingers on the touchscreen, either one finger or multitouch - the ability to gesture with two fingers to have it perform an action like zoom in or out. It contains a proximity sensor at the top of the device, so when you hold it to your head, the display will turn off. Along with that there is also an accelerometer and an ambient light sensor. The accelerometer will detect when you turn the device sideways and automagically rotate the screen for you, and the ambient light sensor will adjust the brightness of the display to the environment.

The biggest downside to the phone is the price - $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB model, and those prices include a discount from a two-year contract. Now remember that these also are a suitable iPod replacement, so you get a phone plus an iPod. But its still tremendously expensive, and it wont be available until June.

Finally, the last announcement is that Apple Computer will no longer be known as Apple Computer, rather just Apple. Taking the focus away from computers and now on to all consumer electronics devices. I don't take this to mean Apple is abandoning the computer business, but rather they don't want to be just a computer company. In the same way Microsoft is expanding their lineup to be across all consumer electronics, so is Apple.

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2 User Comments

1 - Posted by redjac on January 10, 2007 - 3:43 pm

This looks sooper-sweet... for me, however, the question is, how's that soft keyboard going to work? It's got a full QWERTY, which is nice, but it's touchscreen, not physical... is that going to be at all functional? if so, then i want one more than i want sex.

2 - Posted by Kurtis on January 10, 2007 - 5:22 pm

My Treo has a touchscreen numberpad. The iphone is a bit bigger so probably has adequate room for a keyboard, at least for stylus use.

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