It amuses me that apple dare even attempt to make a phone. Their iPods, imo, are sub standard audio players. There arn't really any good portable audio players on the market that can muster the quality of a Creative X-Fi card and a good £110 Sennheiser headphones...
Perhaps the point of having portable audio is portability? With the trade-off being sound quality... I don't remember if Apple is marketing the iPod as having the best sound quality out there, but I also don't think that Creative is marketing the X-Fi as the most portable audio playback device, either...
And onto the iPhone now. It will NOT run OSX at all... Saying that runs OSX is like saying my phone runs Windows... They will have developed a highly stripped down version of OSX that will have limited features. I don't see many software developers diving to make applications for it, unlike with the WM5 smartphones/pdas which have applications from thousands of developers.
Why can't it run OSX? I was always under the impression that modern mobile devices were more than capable of running some distributions of Linux that had a smaller footprint, or perhaps embedded Linux. Since all of the windowing and graphic operations in OSX are handled by Quartz, which relies on the presence of a GPU (whereas older Linux window managers did now), the GPU should be able to take a huge load off of what the CPU would've needed to do to handle the "windowing". But it doesn't even seem like the OSX that iPhone runs supports actual "windowing", all the apps shown so far look like they run full-screen.
Big wow, 8GB in a phone, like that's not been seen before... My old pda had a CF card slot that would take upto 32GB microdrives, and it had an audio chip in it far superior to the ones found in the iPods.
The difference may be that the iPhone is making use of flash-based storage instead storage that is mechanical-based, like the high capacity microdrives that you mentioned. I recall reading somewhere that because of its mechanical nature, microdrives would have a higher failure rate than a flash-based counter part, as well as higher power consumption, thus reducing the battery life?
Any idea what the speed of the processor in this thing is? I'm betting it will not be overclockable, and I doubt it will be lenient on the battery. Making swish graphics is all well and good, but you can fool the unsuspecting public into thinking your device is powerful by heavilly optimising the graphics drawing part of the hardware, and leaving the rest alone.
I would like to see some specs on the CPU myself. Are smartphone or PDA CPUs normally overclockable? If the battery life of 16 hours they quoted for just doing music playback (or 5 hours of talktime) is accurate, that would probably be quite decent. I'm not quite sure what you mean by heavily optimizing the graphics hardware, but I believe that Core Animation and Quartz Extreme-like effects will be carried out by a mini GPU like the Nvidia GoForce series.
There are no details there to show how much RAM it has to actually run applications, so it could be limited to summit like 64Mb for the OS and all the programs like it is on most smartphones.
Yeah, I really wanna know how much RAM this thing will have as well...
And what is this multi tab thing they're on about? Does that mean that you can touch in multiple places on the screen at the same tiume, and it can interpret all the loactions it's been touched. This would require a MASSIVE redesign of current touchscreen technology, or some software trickery...
Well the multi-touch interface has been researched for quite a number of years at various research institutions, I believe. They even released a demo video of a much larger multi-touch display a while back...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-AZrkFuCZo I'm not sure if it can interpret ANY number of touch inputs... but it seems like it can handle at least three at once. Probably not software trickery...
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