Macworld Fervor: iPhone Becomes Next Must-Have DeviceMacworld Fervor: iPhone Becomes Next Must-Have Device

Jack Azout is not a happy man.

Up until 9 on Tuesday morning, he was the new and happy owner of a BlackBerry Pearl smartphone. Not anymore. Oh, he still owns it. He's just no longer very happy about it.

Azout, owner of Prescient Solutions, an IT consulting firm in Miami, was at Steve Jobs' keynote at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco on Tuesday morning. Now he can't wait to ditch his shiny new Pearl and be one of the first to own the iPhone, which isn't slated to start shipping in the United States until June.

"I guess I'll use this until June," Azout says, looking down at his BlackBerry. "It's just that the iPhone does things a whole lot better and does them with elegance and style, and it's fun to use."

A good percentage of the people walking out of Jobs' keynote were already talking about tossing aside their once beloved cell phones, smartphones, and iPods in exchange for the upcoming iPhone. The new device is a three-way combination of wide-screen iPod, cell phone, and Internet communications device. The touch screen, sharp graphics, and OS X operating system are just a few of the new features that had the crowd of Apple aficionados abuzz at Macworld.

Michael Gartenberg, a VP at JupiterResearch, calls the iPhone the most anticipated phone since the time of Alexander Graham Bell. "There's clearly nothing else on the market that will look like it, work like it, and most importantly carry that all important brand of the iPhone," he says.

Azout says he's eager to try out the iPhone's ability to visually show users a list of voice-mail messages.

"I get off a plane and have 20 voice-mail messages," he says. "Now I can choose which ones to listen to. I won't waste my time listening to messages I don't need. I can get to my important calls faster. That, for me, will be life changing."

That kind of visual capability is part of the appeal of the iPhone, which has a new user interface that Jobs called a multitouch display. The screen runs the length of the device, which doesn't have a built-in keypad. The 3.5-inch screen will have 160 pixels per inch for a high resolution.

Users will be able to scroll through contact lists, music lists, or movie lists with a swipe of the finger. A keypad will appear on the touch screen when needed, and then disappear when not needed. Pictures can be enlarged by making a backward pinching motion across the screen. Want to view a horizontal picture in its entirety? Simply turn the device on its side and the picture will appear in a landscape mode.

The phone also runs the Safari Web browser and has Google Maps for traffic reports and driving directions, along with widgets for stock and weather reports. Apple entered into an agreement with Yahoo, which will push e-mail down to iPhone users free of charge.

"Seeing the feature set and the integration with your computer sold me on the concept," says Bob LeVitus, who writes a techie column for the Houston Chronicle and is speaking at Macworld this week. "I hadn't really thought of all the cool things we saw: There's no stylus, no buttons, the interface changes depending on what you're doing. Being able to change the whole user interface on the fly wasn't something I had been expecting."

LeVitus calls the device amazing and says he too can't wait to have one. Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, says the iPhone is a breakthrough product for the smartphone market. "This is well beyond smartphones," he says. "It should be called a brilliant phone."

John Welch, a Unix/open source administrator at Kansas City Life Insurance and a Mac industry analyst who's speaking at Macworld Expo, isn't quite as excited. "It's a $500 phone and it's only on Cingular," he says. "Is it compelling enough to get me to leave Sprint? I don't think so. There's more to a carrier than the phone that's available. Switching carriers is a pain, and if you break your contract, there are penalties."

While he's not marking his calendar for a June switch to the iPhone, Welch says it's a really interesting device. "This will make [Apple] a serious player," he adds. "Will they immediately take over the phone market? No, but they'll be a major player now."

JupiterResearch's Gartenberg agrees that the iPhone will make Apple a player in that market, but he also says it's bound to change the market as well. "Apple has polished what a next-generation mobile experience should look like in terms of calendar, contacts, and media integration," says Gartenberg. "It isn't so much that Apple has invented the cell phone. What they've really done is refine the user experience. There's no doubt it will resonate very well with consumers. This is a device that does belong in the 21st century."

Drawbacks?

Gartenberg says there are a few that will make some users, particularly business users, stick with their BlackBerrys and Palm Treos. The $500 price tag isn't likely to be subsidized down to $49.99 by the carrier. It's a locked device so other applications can't be added to it. E-mail addicts, for instance, won't want to give up that connection to business e-mail.

"This is where it will get interesting," Gartenberg says. "A lot will come down to how well it supports Exchange on the back end. Will it support Exchange for calendar and contacts like I can do with the Treo? Those are important features. Right now, it's really a consumer device. But the consumer and business are slowly merging together, and there's going to be more than one executive who wants to carry this around with him. This is the device that if it doesn't work in the enterprise, people will create a lot of pressure on IT to get it to work."