Apple Set Its iPhone To Stun

“We want to reinvent the phone,” Steve Jobs stated.

We won’t know if Apple will accomplish its goal until the iPhone’s release in June, but a momentary perusal of its list of features will blind you to every other phone on the market.

It does everything you might expect from a normal mobile phone: it calls, it texts, it takes pictures and it checks voicemail. However, these basic features operate in a fundamentally different fashion. The user controls the phone entirely through a single multi-touch “home” button. It also has 3 smart sensors for adjusting brightness, toggling display and touch-screen and displaying portrait/landscape photos. The texts resemble iChat with dialogue bubbles, and photos are viewed and edited through a peculiar pinching motion. Finally, voicemails can be screened visually, allowing you to skip ahead to the ones you want.

The more interesting design concepts and features include quad-band GSM + EDGE technology, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 capabilities (3G to come), the Mac OS X operating system, fully integrated iTunes, standard (not WAP) webpage browsing with Safari, IMAP email via Yahoo (similar to Blackberry), a 2-megapixel camera, 3.5 mm audio jack, an 11.6 mm body and a 4 or 8 GB hard drive depending on the model. The US will get the first taste in summer, followed by Europe in the fall and Asia in 2008.