UK to get iPhone this year

Apple plans late-2007 local debut for iPhone

Apple lived up to high expectations by detailing an innovative approach to smartphones at MacWorld in San Francisco. The touchscreen iPhone was the highlight of Steve Jobs’ opening speech, and should be available in Europe towards the end of this year.

The Apple chief executive described the iPhone as a “revolutionary” and “magical” product that dispenses with keypads in favour of “the ultimate pointing device” - the finger. The touch interface allows some interesting capabilities such as being able to jump to a specific voicemail message rather than waiting through earlier messages.

The iPhone is a quad-band device with Wi-Fi and ships with Apple’s Safari browser, Google and Yahoo search tools, and Google and Apple mapping tools. Yahoo Mail users can have mail pushed to them for free.

The iPhone boasts a 3.5in screen that can be viewed in portrait or widescreen landscape modes in order to better support video and the unit’s 2 megapixel camera, and to view cover art from iTunes music downloads. Perhaps less useful is the inclusion of proximity and light sensors designed to save battery life when the phone is not in use and automatically adapt to ambient lighting conditions.

Just 11mm thick, the iPhone is certain to be a fashionable product but, as ever with Apple, it will be interesting to see how far reliability and durability issues counterbalance the undoubted innovations.

For business-focused users, there was no update on the next version of the Mac OS, codenamed Leopard, or desktops, mobiles or server systems. However, Microsoft said it would offer a universal binary version of Office 2008 in the second half of this year.

There were two small surprises relating to naming conventions. Apple will change its name from Apple Computer to Apple Inc., following a similar move by Dell in 2003. As with Dell, the name change is intended to reflect the wider interests of the new Apple. Also, Apple seems set to keep the iPhone name despite the fact that Cisco’s Linksys subsidiary recently used the name for a voice-over-IP phone launch. The two firms have reportedly signed a deal that will allow Apple to also use the moniker.