It cleverly switches from landscape to portrait depending on how you hold the phone and, to conserve power, it automatically turns off the display when you hold the phone to your ear. It comes in 4 and 8 GB flash drive versions.

It will set you back in the order of $600.00 USD for the basic hardware and software.

It has mapping software that lets you know about traffic density.

Unfortunately, though the phone is theoretically capable of functioning on other networks, Apple has chosen to artificially lock it into the A T & T network.

The CPU, its speed, and the size of RAM are closely guarded secrets. I have written Apple chastising them for being so close-mouthed. However, shortly after the iPhone went on sale, buyers discovered the iPhone is using an ARM1176JZF-based processor, probably the 667 MHz Samsung S3C6400. This chip sports an embedded Java acceleration engine called Jazelle. ARM processors traditionally support two instruction sets; ARM state, with 32-bit instructions and Thumb state which compresses the most commonly used instructions into 16-bit format. The Jazelle technology extends this concept by adding a third instruction set, Java bytecode, to the capability of the processor, together with a new Java state, so it looks as though Jobs has not closed off the possiblity of Java in future. The big problem is Java is not gesture-based like the iPhone.

You need iTunes and a desktop PC to activate the cell phone setting up your air time billing account.

The iPhone does not support Java or Applets. If it happens, Steve Jobs has said it won’t come from Apple. However, it does have a proprietary Apple SDK. Apple forbids people to write their own apps for the iPhone. This is probably the main reason it is not that big a threat to the Blackberry.

Sun has announced cell phone very similar to the iPhone informally called the jPhone. The official product name is Java Mobile FX It has 32 megabytes of RAM and a 200 megahertz ARM processor. There are also dozens of Chinese knockoffs.

Disadvantages

• No high speed wireless data access.
• Instant messaging only via AOL
• No RSS
• Locking prevents you from transferring files on the phone’s storage.
• Emails are delivered only every 15 minutes.
• The camera lacks flash and auto-focus.
• No BlueTooth.
• You can’t replace the battery.

iPhone 3G

Rogers in Canada announced the iPhone 3G will be available starting 2008-07-11. They are charging $60.00 CAD per month, but giving 1/3 the minutes Americans get for the same money. Further downloads are limited to 400 MB a month, where Americans get unlimited downloads. Canada has a near monopoly with only 3 cell phone providers. This situation may improve over the next few years bringing prices down.