Apple founder Steve Jobs unveiled the company's new iPhone 4 on Monday, refusing to allow the leak of a prototype two months ago to steal the thunder from the launch.
"A lot of you have already seen this," Jobs said to delegates at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, referring to the incident in which a prototype was left behind in a bar and sold to Gizmodo, a popular technology blog, and dissected online. "Believe me, you ain't really seen it."
The new phone has a glass front, and antennas integrated for the first time into the stainless steel body. It has more than 100 new features, including an upgraded camera with video-chat capability.
"This is beyond a doubt the most precise thing, one of the most beautiful things we've ever made," Jobs said in his keynote address.
At only 9.3 millimetres thick, the iPhone 4 is 23 per cent thinner than its predecessor, the 3GS, making it "the thinnest smartphone on the planet,"Jobs said.
The 16-gigabyte version will sell in the U.S. for $199 U.S., while the 32-gigabyte 4, which has power to last for seven hours of talk time and six hours of 3G browsing, will retail south of the border for $299 U.S..
The phone will be available in the United States, France, the U.K., Germany, and Japan later this month, and a Canadian launch should come in July.
With more than 50 million sold since its introduction three years ago — and 8.75 million in the latest quarter alone — the iPhone now accounts for 40 per cent of Apple's revenue, and is second only to Research in Motion's industry-leading BlackBerry when it comes to smartphone sales in the United States. But other handsets, powered by Google's Android software, are gaining a foothold in the market.
Despite the much-anticipated announcement, Apple shares trading on the Nasdaq composite index declined about two per cent on Monday to $250.94 U.S.. The company's shares have fallen nearly five per cent since Thursday.
"This is more evolutionary than revolutionary; it doesn't completely change the paradigm for the iPhone," Hudson Square research analyst Daniel Ernst told Reuters. "Expectations got so high for these product launches and announcements that a lot of times, by the time it comes out, it's already (priced into the) stock. They always have to walk on water in order to impress the market."
Jobs had to interrupt his speech before he introduced the newest version of the operating system, called iOS4, to ask reporters in the audience to turn off their Wi-Fi connections. It wasn't a matter of security — with more than 570 people logged in, the system was overloaded and he couldn't show any of the demos.
Among new features is a new "retina" visual display that makes for much higher viewing resolution and smoother scaling of text. The new display has 326 pixels per inch, the highest in any phone, Jobs said.
"We think that retina display will set the standard for several years and that nobody else even comes close," Jobs bragged.
The new phone is powered by the Apple-designed A4 chip, which, along with a new battery, increases usage time considerably compared with existing iPhones.
Jobs started out his speech talking about Apple's previous big thing, the iPad. More than two million have been sold in 10 countries around the world since it was unveiled in January.
"The iPad is changing the way we're experiencing the web," Jobs told the conference, which has 5,200 delegates from 57 different countries.
There are more than 8,500 apps in the iPad store, which have already been downloaded more than 35 million times — that's 17 apps per iPad sold.
Apple iBooks was to be updated Monday with some of the most requested features added —_including the ability to view and read PDFs. In the first 65 days, more than five million books have been downloaded, Jobs said, adding that U.S. publishers have indicated that 22 per cent of all e-book sales are attributed to the iPad.
Addressing the developers in the audience, Jobs said that of the 15,000 apps submitted every week to the App Store, more than 95 per cent are approved within seven days.
Last week, the App Store crossed the five-billion mark of downloads sold. Apple pays 70 per cent of that income to developers, which so far has totalled over $1 billion.
Source: TheGazette
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