And now comes... iPhone

Apple turned 30 on April 1, 2006—quite a milestone for a technology company that, for much of its life, has provided endless fodder for an army of pundits who have made a living out of writing its obituary.

And after months (if not years) of speculation it unvieled the iPhone at MacWorld. The new iPhone is a essentially a combination of three devices: a widescreen iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. It does not have a keyboard.

Apple's new iPhone 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.

The device is 11.6 millimeters thick--thinner than the Motorola Q and Samsung's BlackJack--and has controls on its side. It incorporates a wide, 160-pixel-per-inch touch screen, a single "home" button, 2-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi capability and cellular service. The phone automatically switches from a cellular network to Wi-Fi if it detects a signal.

The iPhone also comes loaded with Apple's Safari Web browser and fully incorporates Google's search and mapping services. Users can make phone calls directly from Google Maps.

The phone also makes use of the same kind of motion detection that powers Nintendo's Wii controller. Photos with a landscape orientation can be switched to portrait simply by turning the phone sideways, or iTunes can move into CoverFlow mode using the same motion. And in another novel interface move, photos and web pages can also be zoomed in and out by squeezing the sides of the phone.

The phone's Mail client can render rich HTML email, and connect to any IMAP or POP server. In a move that will make the iPhone a viable Blackberry competitor, Yahoo has announced free push IMAP to the phone. Indeed, Google and Yahoo both provide integrated search capabilities on the phone.

The iPhone's media capabilities are impressive, and it essentially gives you iPhoto and iTunes in the palm of your hand, complete with CoverFlow. The 3.5mm headphone jack outputs clear sound, and the movies and photos displayed on the phone are very sharp.

While the price tag might be out of range for many teenagers and their parents, Apple loyalists will probably be interested in the new iPhone, even though Apple has no phone expertise, said Chris Crotty, a consumer electronics analyst at iSuppli.