Well all the media including the blogosphere has been hinting at the Apple iPhone for the last couple of years and it’s finally arrived. I’ve just sat through the whole Jobs presentation, all 1hr 30 mins of it, and Apple have definitely gone a long way in terms of reinventing the mobile phone. Most of the Apple fans across the web are already salivating (check out Ajit Anthony’s psoting on DV Guru for an overview of what this little baby can do).

From Steve Jobs’ presentation I have two major quibbles with the phone. First it only has an estimated five-hours of battery life, which considering the phone will play video AND audio, seems a bit disappointing. Also with only 4 or 8GB’s of memory, you won’t get many tracks and movies onto your phone before you run out of memory. With the improvements in flash memory, it would have been nice to see something with a bit more oomph! However I’m sure both battery life and memory have been affected by the size of the player, which look pretty slim.

One of the real surprises, however, was Jobs’ demo of the iPod functionality of the phone, where he used the Beatles “Sgt.Pepper” album to demo the player, with a quick blast of “With A Little Help From My Friends”. He had 6 or 7 Beatles album on the player and all with album artwork. So have Apple Corp finally done a deal with Apple Computers, or is this a dig at the Beatles, and a very unsubtle attempt to get them to license their music for download on the iTunes store? We should be told! Also of interest were the partnerships that were announced with both Google and Yahoo! for their mail service. I also thought the ability to browse the Internet on a phone properly using the Safari browser was awesome.

The only downside, it will take till the 4th quarter of 2007 to get one in Europe. Now I know what I want for Xmas this year.

Nick Watt - Citizen Sound