Apple announced this morning at the Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco that Apple will soon be releasing the iPhone mobile phone.
With the announcement of the iPhone, Motion and Palm’s stock dropped and Apple’s stock went up. Apple stock went up 8% and both Motion and Palm both dropped by about 6%. The stock price increased the Apple market capitalization by about $6 billion.
“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” stated Steve Jobs at MacWorld. “It’s very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. … Apple’s been very fortunate in that it’s introduced a few of these.”
Jobs believes that the iPhone will “reinvent” the wireless market and “leapfrog” beyond other smartphone peripherals. “This goes beyond smartphones and should be given its own category called ‘brilliant’ phones,” stated Tim Bajarin, a Creative Strategies analyst. “Cell phones are on track to become the largest platform for digital music playback and Apple needed to make this move to help defend their iPod franchise as well as extend it beyond a dedicated music environment.”
Though the iPhone is expected to be rather expensive at a price of $499 for a 4GB model and $599 for an 8GB model, Apple is expecting to sell 10 million of them in 2008.
The iPhone is less than half-inch and has a built-in 2MP digital camera. It is supposed to work as well as an iPod, sync-and-transfer music, videos, and photos. The screen is touch-sensitive and works wirelessly with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Another major Apple product soon to release is Apple TV, which is a flat-panel and is able to connect to a PC or Mac over a wireless router. This means when you download movies from iTunes, you can effortlessly play them on your TV.
The Apple TV will cost roughly $299 and are now taking orders, but will not start shipping until February. And the Apple TV also works as a plug-and-play hard-drive. Once you plug in the Apple TV to your USB port, it will show up on iTunes and you can drag-and-drop your movie files onto the Apple TV hard drive.
Apple TV has a remote that appears to be a navigational tree. “It has to be ridiculously simple, and this is the simplest design I’ve seen,” stated Barajin.
