Americans line up outside shops to buy 'magical' iPhone

By Staff
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Google Oneindia News

Washington, June 29 (UNI) Perhaps the most hyped product so far of the 21st century, Apple's "revolutionary and magical" iPhone, goes on sale tonight in the United States.

Americans have been camping outside stores since Monday to get their hands on the tech-savvy gadget, which has caused feverish excitement among technology devotees. If one does not have the time to wait in line, substitute people are available for 300 dollars depending on the waiting time.

With price starting from 500 dollars, the iPhone will be sold from AT&T and Apple stores from 6pm local time. According to Apple's chief executive, Steve Jobs, who has reinvigorated the Californian technology company, the latest the iPhone is five years ahead of its time.

He believes it will transform mobile telephony in the same way the iPod music player transformed the record industry and the Macintosh changed personal computing in the 1980s. About 19 million Americans are expected to buy one, an unprecedented number for a mobile phone, according to media reports.

The iPhone is scheduled to reach Europe later this year, between October and December, once Apple has finalised a tie-up with an as-yet-unnamed telecoms provider to complement AT&T in the US.

The iPhone, which was first revealed at the MacWorld show in San Francisco in January has overtaken the bigger impact created by two other hyped product launches of recent times--Ford's 1964 Mustang and Microsoft's Windows 95. In the past six months, there have been 11,000 print articles and 69 million Google hits on the iPhone.

The question for consumers is: will the phone live up to its hype? Just like any other mobile phone, the iPhone can be used to phone people, but what sets it apart is the number of other tasks it does and its user-friendly features.

It has a music player just like an iPod, capable of storing either 4G or 8G. Videos can be viewed on its screen, an important feature now that television shows can be downloaded. It also has a two mega-pixel camera.

But its biggest selling point is the internet. The iPhone will have full access to the Internet. A web page on an iPhone may well look just as it does on a computer screen and it can also be magnified at a pinch of the finger, allowing users to zoom in on the details. It can also be used to send and receive e-mail.

Above all, what makes this hand-held device unique is it the absence of keyboard. The i-phone is controlled by a touch-screen, which alternates with a flick of a finger from an album cover to an internet page to an email keyboard or phone messages.

David Pogue of The New York Times found a few glitches such as the speed of downloading an Internet page and difficulty in using the onscreen keyboard.

"But even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-challenging piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles," he said.

UNI

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