The Apple CEO looks set to take the world by storm with his new iPhone, says linton chiswick |
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Yesterday was Keynote Speech day at San Francisco's Macworld Expo trade show. Popularly known as 'The Stevenote' - after Steve Jobs, the charismatic CEO who co-founded, left and then returned to Apple - the two-hour speech is Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving rolled into one for the breathtakingly loyal and enthusiastic community of Mac-users.
Dressed in trademark black turtleneck, 'His Steveness' is part-preacher, part-Messiah, summoning up sleek, technologically advanced miracles before thousands of worshippers. This is how, down the years, we have been introduced to the iPod, the OS X operating system and the iMac.
Yesterday's speech followed a year of lies, rumours and predictions about a hybrid cellphone-iPod device. Apple followers were ravenous for new product and queues for the 9am speech began forming at 2am. |
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| Disappointment wasn’t on the agenda. Jobs swept on stage with, ‘We’re going to make history together today’ |
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Disappointment clearly wasn't on the agenda. Jobs swept onto the stage with, "We're going to make some history together today." Two hours later, the tech world was examining a device that surpassed expectation and makes other smartphones - including the Blackberry - resemble Stone Age relics.
The iPhone is radically clever - a mobile phone, iPod, and tiny tablet Mac computer rolled into a sleek glassy shell interrupted by a single button. There are no keys and no stylus. Instead, a gesture recognition interface and series of sensors translate finger movements into commands (to shrink an image, just pinch it, etc).
And where other smartphones run limited mobile operating systems, the iPhone runs the same OS X operating system as the Mac. It's a sophisticated computer in a tiny shell.
Jobs was two-thirds into his speech when, demonstrating the stock quote widget, he playfully checked on Apple's share price - up $2.40 and climbing. The iPhone already had its first official endorsement. 
FIRST POSTED JANUARY 10, 2007
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