iPhone To Rule Over Smartphones?

With its great looks and slim figure you may be forgiven for thinking the iPhone is a smartphone phone. With its sleek, snazzy design, it’s wide, bright screen, and its huge storage capacity; the iPhone seeks to bring high-end smartphone features to the mainstream masses.

The iPhone’s main claim to fame is the power of its new user interface and touchscreen. During his Macworld keynote speech, Apple CEO Steve Jobs emphasized that smartphones may benefit from better design. Take Web browsing, for instance. The iPhone has the capacity to display full-screen Web sites rather than deform them to fit on a mobile phone’s tiny screen, as most smartphones do.

The Apple iPhone also boasts a cool new set of features to include an accelerometer that recognizes when you rotate the phone from portrait to landscape whilst simultaneously rotating whatever application you’re using. There’s also a proximity sensor that knows when you’re holding the phone to your face. And there’s even a light sensor that makes the screen brighter or darker, depending on where you are.

This will surely force the likes of other smartphone manufacturers (Palm, Microsoft, and RIM) to meet Apple on their own turf – improving the look and feel of their products while maintaining the smartphone-class features that business users demand.

However smartphones have little to fear for now. For a start the iPhone has no 3G connectivity, which business users thrive on. Instead, it offers access to Cingular’s EDGE network, with speeds closer to dial-up than DSL. Another drawback is that the iPhone’s version of OS X does not let users add their own software; Microsoft-, Palm-, and RIM-powered handsets however do. And with the hefty price tag that comes with the iPhone, I don’t envisage many IT managers or data centre directors purchasing a mobile phone that offers iPod capabilities but fails to offer basic secure push e-mail!