iPhone

The iPhone normally prevents access to its media player and web features unless it has also been activated as a phone with an authorized carrier. On July 3, 2007, Jon Lech Johansen reported on his blog that he had successfully bypassed this requirement and unlocked the iPhone’s other features with a combination of custom software and modification of the iTunes binary. He published the software and offsets for others to use.

Unlike the original, the 3G iPhone must be activated in the store in most countries.This need for in-store activation, as well as the huge number of first-generation iPhone and iPod Touch users upgrading to iPhone OS 2.0, caused a worldwide overload of Apple’s servers on July 11, 2008, the day on which both the iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0 updates were released. After the update, devices were required to connect to Apple’s servers to authenticate the update, causing many devices to be temporarily unusable.

However, on the O2 network in the United Kingdom, users can buy the phone online and activate it via iTunes, as with the previous model. Likewise, in Australia, iPhones purchased as a pre-paid kit do not require in-store activation, but require activation online at the Optus website and iTunes.

While initially iPhones were only sold on the AT&T network with a SIM lock in place, various hackers have found methods to “unlock” the phone; more recently some carriers have started to sell unlocked iPhones More than a quarter of iPhones sold in the United States were not registered with AT&T. Apple speculates that they were likely shipped overseas and unlocked.AT&T has stated that the “iPhone cannot be unlocked, even if you are out of contract”.
On November 21, 2007, T-Mobile in Germany announced it would sell the phone unlocked and without a T-Mobile contract, caused by a preliminary injunction against T-Mobile put in place by their competitor, Vodafone. In Germany, a company is not allowed to lock the SIM card to itself.On December 4, 2007, a German court decided to grant T-Mobile exclusive rights to sell the iPhone with SIM lock, overturning the temporary injunction. In addition, T-Mobile will voluntarily offer to unlock customers’ iPhone after the termination of the contract.

On carriers where removal of the iPhone’s SIM lock is allowed the carrier can submit a request to Apple which will then remove the carrier locking on the next restore of the iPhone through iTunes. Customers of the carriers Optus and Vodafone in Australia have so far been successful in unlocking their phones to work on any network.

Apple has filed more than 300 patents related to the technology behind the iPhone

LG Electronics claimed the iPhone’s design was copied from the LG Prada. Woo-Young Kwak, head of LG Mobile Handset R&D Center, said at a press conference, “We consider that Apple copied Prada phone after the design was unveiled when it was presented in the iF Design Award and won the prize in September 2006.
Shortly after Steve Jobs’ January 9, 2007 announcement that Apple would be selling a product called iPhone in June 2007, Cisco issued a statement that it had been negotiating trademark licensing with Apple and expected Apple to agree to the final documents that had been submitted the night before.On January 10, 2007 Cisco announced it had filed a lawsuit against Apple over the infringement of the trademark iPhone, seeking an injunction in federal court to prohibit Apple from using the name. More recently, Cisco claimed that the trademark lawsuit was a “minor skirmish” that was not about money, but about interoperability.
On February 2, 2007, Apple and Cisco announced that they had agreed to temporarily suspend litigation while they hold settlement talks,and subsequently announced on February 20, 2007 that they had reached an agreement. Both companies will be allowed to use the “iPhone” name in exchange for “exploring interoperability” between their security, consumer, and business communications products.

* Color: Black (8 GB or 16 GB) or white (16 GB)
* Size: 4.5 inches (115.5 mm) (h) × 2.4 inches (62.1 mm) (w) × 0.48 inch (12.3 mm) (d)
* Weight: 133 g (4.7 oz)
* Headphone jack (non-recessed)
* Battery has up to 10 hours of 2G talk, 5 hours of 3G talk, 5 (3G) or 6 (Wi-Fi) hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback, and up to 24 hours of audio playback, lasting over 300 hours on standby.
* Tri band UMTS / HSDPA: UMTS 850 / 1900 / 2100
* Assisted GPS, with preference to location based on Wi-Fi or cell towers
* Digital SAR Rating: 1.38 W/kg

* 4 GB model (discontinued after two months)
* Size: 4.5 inches (115 mm) (h) × 2.4 inches (61 mm) (w) × 0.46 inch (11.6 mm) (d)
* Weight: 135 g (4.8 oz)
* Battery has up to 8 hours of talk, 6 hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback, and up to 24 hours of audio playback, lasting over 250 hours on standby.
* Headphone jack (recessed)
* Digital SAR of 0.974 W/kg

* Screen size: 3.5 in (89 mm)
* Screen resolution: 480×320 pixels at 163 ppi, with 3:2 aspect ratio
* Input devices: Multi-touch screen interface plus a “Home” button
* Built-in rechargeable, non-removable battery
* 2 megapixel camera
* Location finding by detection of cell towers and Wi-Fi networks
* Samsung S5L890 (412 MHzARM 1176 processor, PowerVR MBX 3D graphics co-processor)
* Memory: 128 MB DRAM
* Storage: 8 GB or 16 GB flash memory
* Operating System: iPhone OS
* Quad band GSM / GPRS / EDGE: GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
* Wi-Fi (802.11b/g)
* Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR

The genesis of the iPhone began with Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ direction that Apple engineers investigate touchscreens. Apple created the device during a secretive and unprecedented collaboration with AT&T Mobility—Cingular Wireless at the time of the phone’s inception—at a development cost of US$150 million by one estimate. During development, the iPhone was codenamed “Purple 2″. The company rejected an early “design by committee” built with Motorola in favor of engineering a custom operating system and interface and building custom hardware.

The iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007. Apple closed its stores at 2:00 pm local time to prepare for the 6:00 pm iPhone launch, while hundreds of customers lined up at stores nationwide. Apple sold 270,000 iPhones in the first 30 hours on launch weekend. In 2007, 8 million iPhones were sold in the U.S. according to the Entertainment Software Association. The original iPhone was subsequently made available in five other countries: Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, and Austria.

On July 11, 2008, Apple released the iPhone 3G in twenty-two countries, including the original six. Forty-eight more are expected to follow in the months afterwards.The first iPhone 3G in the world was sold in Auckland, New Zealand to Jonny Gladwell, a 22-year-old student, at one minute past midnight NZST. In the United States, purchasing the new phone will require signing a two-year provider contract with AT&T. On the iPhone 3G release date in the United States, many units initially failed to activate because Apple’s iTunes servers were overloaded. Apple sold 1 million iPhone 3Gs in its first 3 days on sale.

For text input, the device implements a virtual keyboard on the touchscreen. It has automatic spell checking and correction, predictive word capabilities, and a dynamic dictionary that learns new words. The predictive word capabilities have been integrated with the dynamic virtual keyboard so that users will not have to be extremely accurate when typing—i.e. touching the edges of the desired letter or nearby letters on the keyboard will be predictively corrected when possible. The keys are somewhat larger and spaced farther apart when in landscape mode, currently available using the Safari web browser and certain third-party applications with Landscape Mode support. Not focusing more on texting has been considered a chief weakness of the iPhone, while at the same time others believe the virtual keyboard to be a bold step and a worthwhile risk. The lack of a physical keyboard allows for the keyboard to be optimized for different applications and languages.

The built-in Bluetooth 2.x+EDR supports wireless earpieces, which requires the HSP profile, but notably does not support stereo audio (requires A2DP), laptop tethering (requires DUN and SPP), or the OBEX file transfer protocol (requires FTP, GOEP, and OPP). The lack of these profiles prevent iPhone users from exchanging multimedia files with other bluetooth-enabled cell phones, including pictures, music and videos.

Text messages are presented chronologically in a mailbox format similar to Mail, which places all text from recipients together with replies. Text messages are displayed in speech bubbles (similar to iChat) under each recipient’s name. The iPhone currently has built-in support for e-mail message forwarding, drafts, and direct internal camera-to-e-mail picture sending. However, it does not yet have capabilities for delivery reports, MMS, or copy/cut/paste. Support for multi-recipient SMS was added in the January 2008 (v1.1.3) software update.

The iPhone features a built in 2.0 megapixel camera located on the back for still digital photos. It has no optical zoom, flash or autofocus, and does not support video recording.

The iPhone includes software that allows the user to upload, view, and e-mail photos. The user zooms in and out of photos by “unpinching” and “pinching” them through the multi-touch interface. The software interacts with iPhoto and Aperture software on the Mac and Photoshop software in Windows. In version 2.0 of the iPhone OS, users can choose to allow location data to be embedded in the pictures producing geocoded photographs (geotagging).