Understanding the iPhone Features

After a long wait, Apple release the electronic product that everybody was talking about: the iPhone. This new cell phone, integrating the web, personal productivity applications, and mobile phone, made a change in the way the industry design and market mobile systems.

The number of features of the iPhone are big, so we are gonna describe only the most interesting of them in this article.

Web browsing

The first and most interesting feature of the iPhone is its web browsing capabilities. Different from other cell phones which present users with a "mobile only" version of web pages, the iPhone goes for the whole thing.

In previous generations of mobile phones, web browsers show what is know as "mobile HTML", a stripped down version of web pages that could fit more easily in the limited memory of these devices.

Viewing a mobile version of a web page is better than nothing, but it doesn't help when the page you want to see doesn't have a mobile version. Moreover, the mobile version of web pages is frequently different from the original version. For example, Javascript and other useful capabilities may not be present for lack of resources.

In the iPhone, however, there is a full-feature browser, the same browser (Safari) that is available on the Apple desktop computers. It really shows the web like it is, with Javascript, images, colors, and everything that you can see in a normal page.

There is no way to deny that the iPod is the standard for music players. The iPod has set the parameters for capacity, reliability, and style in the market of MP3 players. The iPhone is following with the same technology as the iPod.

Among the features of the iPhone as a music player is the connection with the iTunes store. You can share the same musics between your iPod and the iPhone, and more importantly, you can play the same music at the same time that you are receiving calls.

The iPhone also has the functionality of a personal organizer, with software for scheduling meetings, personal agenda, and address book.

In this area, I believe the iPhone has done one of the best things for personal productivity: to combine a good address book with the cell phone. Most of the personal organizers, such as Palm or Pocket PC, have some level of integration with address book. The iPhone, however, takes this integration to the next level, with automatic updates to the Mac OS -- no additional software necessary.

One of the best things about the iPhone is that it is a standards-compliant, open platform. Any web application that is implemented using web standards can run on the iPhone.

For example, Google applications such as Google maps and Gmail run in the same way they do in the desktop. And using Google maps on the run is certainly one of the best things of having an iPhone!

Even with all these nice features, many people still think that the design of the iPhone is its best advantage. The sleek, small case has only one button to operate. The huge screen has touch-based sensors that let you interact with the iPhone in innovative ways.

For example, the on-screen keyboard has a self-correcting mechanism that guesses the right word even if you make a mistake.

The screen also uses an Apple-patented technology that changes the orientation of the images (portrait to landscape) whenever the screen is rotated. So you can view a movie or a picture in landscaping by just rotating the device -- the change will be done automatically.

For reasons like this, the iPhone has established itself as a standard for others to follow. I think it will be successful during a long time in the market of smart phone devices.

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