Word: phoning
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...Cell phones do all kinds of stuff-calling, text messaging, Web browsing, contact management, music playback, photos and video-but they do it very badly, by forcing you to press lots of tiny buttons, navigate diverse heterogeneous interfaces and squint at a tiny screen. "Everybody hates their phone," Jobs says, "and that's not a good thing. And there's an opportunity there." To Jobs's perfectionist eyes, phones are broken. Jobs likes things that are broken. It means he can make something that isn't and sell it to you for a premium price...
...That was why, two and a half years ago, Jobs sicced his wrecking crew of designers and engineers on the cell phone as we know and hate it. They began by melting the face off a video iPod. No clickwheel, no keypad. They sheared off the entire front and replaced it with a huge, bright, vivid screen-that touchscreen Jobs got so excited about a few paragraphs ago. When you need to dial, it shows you a keypad; when you need other buttons, the screen serves them up. When you want to watch a video, the buttons disappear. Suddenly...
...Into that iPod they stuffed a working version of Apple's operating system, OS X, so the phone could handle real, non-toy applications like Web browsers and e-mail clients. They put in a cell antenna, plus two more antennas for WiFi and Bluetooth; plus a bunch of sensors, so the phone knows how bright its screen should be, and whether it should display vertically or horizontally, and when it should turn off the touchscreen so you don't accidentally operate it with your...
...inch thick, and widened it to what looks like a bar of expensive chocolate wrapped in aluminum and stainless steel. The iPhone is a typical piece of Ive design: an austere, abstract, platonic-looking form that somehow also manages to feel warm and organic and ergonomic. Unlike my phone. He picks it up and points out four little nubbins on the back. "Your phone's got feet on," he says, not unkindly. "Why would anybody put feet on a phone?" Ive has the answer, of course: "It raises the speaker on the back off the table. But the right solution...
...forget about phone calls. Look at the video, which is impressively crisp and plays on a screen larger than the video iPod's. This is the first time the hype about "rich media" on a phone has actually looked plausible. Look at the e-mail client, which handles attachments, in-line images, HTML e-mails as adroitly as a desktop client. Look at the Web browser, a modified version of Safari that displays actual Web pages, not a teensy crunched-down version of the Web. There's a Google map application that's almost worth the price of admission...