The iPhone started out the way a lot of cool things do: as something completely different. A few years ago, Steve Jobs noticed how many development dollars were being spent--particularly in the greater Seattle metropolitan area--on what are called tablet PCs: flat portable computers that work with a touch screen instead of a mouse and keyboard. Jobs, being Jobs, was curious. He had some Apple engineers noodle around with a touch screen. When they showed him what they came up with, he got excited.
So excited he forgot all about tablet computers. He had bigger game to hunt.
Jobs had just led Apple on a triumphant rampage through a new market sector, portable digital-music players, and he was looking around for more technology to conquer. He found the ideal target sitting on his hip. Consumers bought nearly a billion cell phones last year, 10 times the number of iPods in circulation. Break off just 1% of that, and you can buy yourself a lot of black turtlenecks. "It was unanimous that this should be it," Jobs says. "It wasn't even by a little, it was by a mile. It was the hardest one too." Apple's new iPhone, which will be available in June, could do to the cell-phone market what the iPod did to the portable-music-player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority. This is unfortunate for anybody else who makes cell phones, but it's good news for those of us who use them.
This could be huge. The touchscreen looks to be a killer app that would certainly appeal to fans of iPods as well as devices such as the Motorola Q, Samsung Blackjack and other multiple-use cell phone devices. Apple has proven themselves to excel at design and the form and function of their products are as sleek and slick as they come. This could complete the transformation of Apple from a computer company to a full spectrum consumer electronics company.
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