The iPhone is an internet-connected multimedia smartphone designed and marketed by Apple Inc. with a flush multi-touch screen and a minimal hardware interface. The device does not have a physical keyboard, so a virtual keyboard is rendered on the touch screen instead. The iPhone functions as a camera phone (including text messaging and visual voicemail), a portable media player (equivalent to an iPod), and an Internet client (with email, web browsing, and local Wi-फीconnectivity). The first-generation phone hardware was quad-band GSM with EDGE; the second generation also adds UMTS with HSDPA.
Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007.The announcement was preceded by rumors and speculation that circulated for several months.The iPhone was initially introduced in the United States on June 29, 2007, and has since been introduced worldwide. It was named Time magazine's "Invention of the Year" in 2007. On July 11, 2008, the iPhone 3G was released. It supports faster 3G data speeds and Assisted GPS। On March 17, 2009, Apple announced the iPhone firmware version 3.0, due to be released in mid 2009.
Development of iPhone began with Apple CEO Steve Jobs' direction that Apple engineers investigate touchscreens. Apple created the device during a secretive and unprecedented collaboration with AT&T Mobility—Cingular Wireless at the time—at an estimated development cost of US$150 million over thirty months. Apple rejected the "design by committee" approach that had yielded the Motorola ROKR E1, a largely unsuccessful collaboration with Motorola. Instead, Cingular gave Apple the liberty to develop the iPhone's hardware and software in-house. Numerous codenames and even fake prototypes were devised to keep the project secretJobs unveiled iPhone to the public on January 9, 2007 in a keynote address. Apple was required to file for operating permits with the FCC, but such filings are available to the public, so the announcement came several months before the iPhone received approval. The iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007. Apple closed its stores at 2:00 pm local time to prepare for the 6:00 pm iPhone launch, while hundreds of customers lined up at stores nationwide. On launch weekend, Apple sold 270,000 iPhones in the first thirty hours. The original iPhone was made available in the UK, France, and Germany in November 2007, and Ireland and Austria in the spring of 2008.
On July 11, 2008, Apple released the iPhone 3G in twenty-two countries, including the original six. Apple sold 1 million iPhone 3Gs in its first 3 days on sale, enough to overload Apple's United States iTunes servers. Apple has since released the iPhone 3G in upwards of eighty countries and territories.
Over 3 million units were sold in the first month after the 3G launch, at a "blistering sales pace". The phenomenon of popular willingness to upgrade to the 3G so soon after purchase of an earlier model was attributed to Apple's popularity and its frequent imitators. The anomalously high demand for the first-generation iPhone was reflected in free-market prices for older models that began to rise steadily within days of the 3G launch resetting the price baselines.
On January 21, 2009, Apple announced sales of 4.36 million iPhone 3Gs in the first quarter of fiscal 2009, ending December 2008, totaling 17.4 million iPhones to date. Sales from Q4 2008 surpassed RIM's BlackBerry sales of 5.2 million units, making Apple the third largest mobile phone manufacturer by revenue, after Nokia and Samsung. While iPhone sales constitute a significant portion of Apple's revenue, some of this income is देफेर्रेड
The iPhone allows audio conferencing, call holding, call merging, caller ID, and integration with other cellular network features and iPhone functions. For example, if a song is playing while a call is received, it gradually fades out, and fades back when the call has ended. The proximity sensor shuts off the screen and touch-sensitive circuitry when the iPhone is brought close to the face, both to save battery and prevent unintentional touches. The iPhone only supports voice दिअलिंग through third party applications[citation needed] and video calling is not supported at all.
The iPhone includes a visual voicemail (in some countries) feature allowing users to view a list of current voicemail messages on-screen without having to call into their voicemail. Unlike most other systems, messages can be listened to and deleted in a non-chronological order by choosing any message from an on-screen list. AT&T, O2, T-Mobile Germany, and Orange modified their voicemail infrastructure to accommodate this new feature designed by Apple.[citation needed]
A music ringtone feature was introduced in the United States on September 5, 2007. Users can create custom ringtones from songs purchased from the iTunes Store for a small additional fee. The ringtones can be 3 to 30 seconds long from any part of a song, can fade in and out, pause from half a second to five seconds when looped, or loop continuously. All customizing can be done in iTunes, and the synced ringtones can also be used for alarms. Custom ringtones can also be created using Apple's GarageBand software 4.1.1 or later (available only on Mac OS X) and third-party tools.Custom ringtones are not supported in some countries।
The layout of the music library is similar to that of an iPod or current Symbian S60 phones. The iPhone can sort its media library by songs, artists, albums, videos, playlists, genres, composers, podcasts, audiobooks, and compilations. Options are always presented alphabetically, except in playlists, which retain their order from iTunes. The iPhone uses a large font that allows users plenty of room to touch their selection. Users can rotate their device horizontally to landscape mode to access Cover Flow. Like on iTunes, this feature shows the different album covers in a scroll-through photo library. Scrolling is achieved by swiping a finger across the screen.
The iPhone supports gapless playback. Like the fifth generation iPods introduced in 2005, the iPhone can play digital video, allowing users to watch TV shows and movies in widescreen. Unlike other image-related content, video on the iPhone plays only in the landscape orientation, when the phone is turned sideways. Double-tapping switches between widescreen and fullscreen video playback.
The iPhone allows users to purchase and download songs from the iTunes Store directly to their iPhone. The feature originally required a Wi-Fi network, but now can use the cellular data network if one is not available.
External TV tuner cards are available for watching mobile TV, via TV stations on 1seg in Japan (SoftBank), and for soon for the proprietary subscription-based FLO TV in the U.S. (Qualcomm).[citation needed] There is also a "converter" for watching DVB-H in Europe and elsewhere via WiFi streaming video (PacketVideo)।
Internet access is available when the iPhone is connected to a local area Wi-Fi or a wide area GSM or EDGE network, both second-generation (2G) wireless data standards. The iPhone 3G also supports third-generation UMTS and HSDPA 3.6, but not HSDPA 7.2 or HSUPA networks. AT&T introduced 3G in July 2004, but as late as 2007 Steve Jobs felt that it was still not widespread enough in the US, and the chipsets not energy efficient enough, to be included in the iPhone. The iPhone 3G has a maximum download rate of 1.4 Mbp/s in the US, although faster speeds are available in Europe (T-Mobile in The Netherlands, for instance, provides 2048 kbyte/s down/384kbit/s up). Support for 802.1X, an authentication system commonly used by university and corporate Wi-Fi networks, was added in the 2.0 version update.
By default, the iPhone will ask to join newly discovered Wi-Fi networks and prompt for the password when required. Alternatively, it can join closed Wi-Fi networks manually. The iPhone will automatically choose the strongest network, connecting to Wi-Fi instead of EDGE when it is available. Similarly, the iPhone 3G prefers 3G to 2G, and Wi-Fi to either. Users can disable all wireless connections by activating Airplane Mode.
Safari is the iPhone's native web browser, and it displays pages similar to its Mac OS X counterpart. Web pages may be viewed in portrait or landscape mode and supports automatic zooming by pinching together or spreading apart fingertips on the screen, or by double-tapping text or images. The iPhone supports neither Flash nor Java. Consequently, the UK's Advertising Standards Authority adjudicated that an advertisement claiming the iPhone could access "all parts of the internet" should be withdrawn in its current form, on grounds of false advertising. The iPhone supports SVG, CSS, HTML Canvas, and Bonjour.
The maps application can access Google Maps in map, satellite, or hybrid form. It can also generate directions between two locations, while providing optional real-time traffic information. Support for walking directions, public transit, and street view was added in the version 2.2 software update. During the iPhone's announcement, Jobs demonstrated this feature by searching for nearby Starbucks locations and then placing a prank call to one with a single tap. Apple also developed a separate application to view YouTube videos on the iPhone, which streams videos after encoding them using the open H.264 codec. Simple weather and stock quotes also tap in to the Internet.
iPhone users can and do access the internet frequently, and in a variety of places. According to Google, the iPhone generates 50 times more search requests than any other mobile handset. According to Deutsche Telekom CEO René Obermann, "The average Internet usage for an iPhone customer is more than 100 megabytes. This is 30 times the use for our average contract-based consumer customers
