Apple launches AppleTV and iPhone
By
Shawn Barnett
(Tuesday, January 9, 2007 - 14:14 EST)
Normally out of our realm in terms of hardware, Apple has announced both Apple TV and iPhone, two devices that allow you to work with multimedia, including music, television, movies, and photographs.
Apple TV brings all the great stuff, including photos and videos you have on your PC or Mac to your television, and iPhone brings pretty much all of that stuff, plus the internet and telephony, to your cell phone.
iPhone runs Mac OS X. That's a headline in itself.
As a former handheld PDA reviewer, I'm frankly aghast. The iPhone essentially has nearly all I've ever wanted in a PDA, and most of its functionality is accessable with the most natural stylus in the world: a fingertip. And just to keep it relevant to Imaging Resource, it even has a 2 megapixel camera built in.
Palm and Microsoft should have evolved their products to this level so long ago. As a Palm columnist, I called for this kind of evolution over and over. It remains to be seen whether it has real legs, however. The last truly friendly operating system for handheld computing was the Palm OS. Every time they stretched themselves to reach for this goal, they didn't have the horsepower to follow up with meaningful software updates to fix inevitable bugs. Apple has its share of bugs, but most of their products work very well on the first generation, and they're very good about fixing bugs and updating features.
Just amazing. A 4GB model will sell for $499 and an 8GB model will go for $599. The partner is Cingular, soon to once again become AT&T Wireless. Such a weird world. No word yet on whether it will be available unlocked for use on other networks. iPhone will ship in the USA in June.
AppleTV features a 40GB hard drive, and interacts with household PCs of either type via WiFi and ethernet, and allows you to play most content downloaded for iPod on your big screen TV, and you can view movie trailers on your big screen TV just like you already can via iTunes or iMac. It's unclear how all that will play out, but the set-top box will be available for $299 in February.
Details in this report initally came from reading the excellent engadget.com keynote report. All details are now available at apple.com.
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