Apple redefines the smartphone

In recent articles and blog posts, I have proposed the smartphone as an embedded system user interface so I was particularly interested in yesterday’s iPhone announcement from Apple. Amid all of the hype from the Consumer Electronics Show and Macworld, I tuned in to CEO Steve Jobs’ keynote to watch the announcement. The iPhone combines the features of the company’s popular video iPod player, a quad-band GSM EDGE smartphone, and a 320 x 480 pixel touchscreen display plus a subset of the Mac OS X operating system. The obvious difference between the iPhone and typical smartphones such as such as the Motorola Q or Palm Treo series is the absence of a keyboard. All iPhone interaction is via the touchscreen using your fingers. Although the touchscreen software provides several novel features, such as a very slick scrolling technique, the iPhone still requires two hands for most operations. Other technical specifications include a 2 mega pixel camera, 5 hours of talk, video playback, or Internet browsing time, and 16 hours of audio playback.

Protected by over 200 patents, the iPhone features several new innovations such as sensors to automatically detect phone orientation and switch between portrait and landscape modes or “multitouch” where you can zoom in or out by using two fingers in a pinching motion. The touchscreen is also automatically disabled by a proximity sensor when the phone nears your face. There are no 3G communications capabilities yet but the built-in WiFi interface will provide high speed data exchange. Since this is the first OS X based phone, the selection of plug-in software applications will initially be limited. The iPhone is not due out until June and Apple has not yet released any information or tools for third party developers. Other possible problems for embedded designers are the cost and single carrier. A 4 GB iPhone will cost $500 while the 8 GB version is $600. Apple has also signed a multi-year exclusive deal with Cingular as the exclusive carrier. Although cost may rule it out in many applications, the iPhone hardware and software package offers designers plenty of unique opportunities to for embedded system control and data exchange especially if it becomes as ubiquitous as the iPod.