iPhone Impressions from Macworld Expo

Five minutes into the Macworld Expo Keynote Address and Steve Jobs was already finished talking about Macintosh! He then spent nearly two hours in a virtually flawless, jaw-dropping presentation of Apple's new iPhone. The Keynote and the iPhone were examples of Apple and Jobs at the very top of their game.

I don't have to tell you the iPhone is amazing. But I will. Its AMAZING!! As I sat there with 4000 other eager Macolites, I must have grabbed my head in both hands and gasped at least four times. The simplicity and elegance of the phone is almost unbelievable.

Sure, it is just a smart phone. But I have been using smart phones for years (people even pay me to show them how theirs work) and the iPhone suddenly makes them look like they have all the sophistication of a hand crank adding machine. As one columnist said: "It is not just smart; it's brilliant".

Amazing! A sensor to deactivate controls when it is pressed against your ear; a sensor to change orientation of the picture when you turn the phone in your hand; a sensor to adjust the intensity of the display for ambient light conditions. Colossal! The simplicity of unlocking it with the "slide to open" gesture; the ease of creating conference calls; its ability to automatically switch to the far less expensive and faster WIFI whenever available. Stupendous! The amazing two-fingered pinch gesture magnification; the eye-rolling simplicity of the one finger scroll gesture; the bald fact that it is designed to use the input device we were all born with to use -- our fingers!

How often do you get to see a new product that is literally YEARS ahead of its competition doing things they never even dreamed of? And the Keynote Address itself. Surely this will go down in marketing history as one of the textbook cases for product introduction. Jobs was relaxed and eager after hardly sleeping all night. We didn't even see him fluff it up with words like "super", "delicious", "beautiful" and "fantastic"... He didn't have to! The famed "Reality Distortion Field" spread out of room, beyond the Moscone Center and extended hundreds of miles all the way to Las Vegas. And, I am telling you, I met people who came from the Consumer Elctronics Show in Vegas who claimed they had met a lot of very depressed Motorola and other cellphone vendor staff there.

Sure there were sceptics casting aspersions on iPhone's network limitations, its data speed, the sealed battery.. you name it. But they were SO missing the point. Jobs has taken all the worthwhile, must-have, everyday features of a complex smartphone and made them as easy to access as flicking on a light switch. It was quite a triumph and well worth dropping the word "Computer" from "Apple, Inc".

Can't wait until June --or whenever it finally arrives in Canada? No problem. Build your own Do-It-Yourself Cut & Fold Paper iPhone here.