iPhone History And Development

Apple has proven to be one of the major players in the consumer electronics industry. Having established their name as a company who designs their products to be trendy, functional and innovative, they have released yet another gadget that has been and continues to be a big hit.

The Apple iPhone is a small and light device with multimedia capabilities and also functions as a quad-band mobile phone, which supports GSM EDGE and is Internet-enabled. A touch screen enables the user to input information through a virtual keyboard and function buttons. It also has great features, such as a camera, a media player (much like the "iPod"), and the other usual functions that allow visual voicemail and text messaging. The Internet services that can be done through the iPhone include web browsing, e-mail and Wi-Fi connectivity.

In the United States, the iPhone became available on June 29, 2007 and can be originally purchased at Apple stores and AT&T Mobility. Based on the report of The Wall Street Journal, it is made under contract in the Shenzhen factory of the company Hon Hai, a Taiwan-based company. The price today for an 8-gigabyte model is US$399. Later on, Apple eventually became available in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France and will hopefully be available to other areas of the world.

There has been a lot of talk that the iPhone could just be the greatest invention that has ever graced the mobile phone world, but just where and how did it come about?

The birth of the iPhone started with the direction of Apple CEO Steve Jobs to Apple engineers to look into touch-screens. During that time, he was contemplating on working on tablet PCs.

At an executive conference held in April 2003, he originally communicated his certainty that traditional PDAs and tablet PCs did not really seem like feasible and high-demand product industries that Apple could enter. This was in spite of receiving numerous requests for Apple to create another PDA. However, he believed that mobile phones are essential devices for information access on the go.

Nevertheless, the development of iPhone and its features and applications rolled along soon after that and during the Macworld convention last January 9, 2007, Jobs declared their new product, which was the iPhone. This announcement received great attention from the press and the media. Later, in the Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference held on June 11, 2007, an announcement was made that the iPhone will be able to support third-party applications with the use of the Safari engine. Third-party software companies will design Web 2.0 applications and end-users can access them through the Internet. Apple then announced on October 17, 2007 that there would eventually be a software development kit available by February 2008.