iPhone expert

   

As with many Apple products, the iPhone seemed to appear from nowhere and quickly mop up the market. The massive and unprecedented media interest, and the speed at which it grew, may have had you believing that this remarkable device appeared fully formed from Steve Jobs' pocket after just a few days' development. Of course, that is not the case. It takes years of development and research to produce something like the iPhone and, as with all of Apple's products, this one was shrouded in the utmost secrecy until the day it was unveiled to the world. That did not stop rumours circulating, though, some of which were surprisingly accurate. Come with us as we investigate the behind-the-scenes story of the iPhone, where it came from, and how it came to be.
 

The build-up

The iPhone was a will the)- won't they story for three years before its first appearance. What started out as a logical supposition on the back of the iPod's phenomenal success turned into semi-believable rumour and, eventually, credible reportage as time rolled on. Finally, in January 2007, in front of an audience of 4,000 at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco, Steve Jobs whipped the sleek device from his pocket and even the wildest of rumours and expectations were proved to be hugely conservative.

But lets rewind and start our story with the registration of an unremarkable, and easily missed domain: www.ipbone.org. This was snapped up on 16 December 1999 — before even the iPod came to market — and from that date started linking to www.apple.cow. By November 2006, it was pulling in about 550,000 hits. Not bad for a site with no specific content, and in fact a far better performance than the www.ipod.com domain, also owned by Apple.

But then Apple's domains are both extensive and varied, so few were eager to read too much into this virtual property. It also owns the highly specific www.itunes.com, the radically generic (and valuable) www.airport. com and entirely bizarre www.mammals.org. Go figure. We asked the Apple contact listed on the domain's record whether the company had been the original registrar or bought it from someone else. The two-word reply was a curt 'No comment'. Just how big a secret was the iPhone project?

Such a response is not uncommon from Apple. The company is famously tight-lipped when it comes to new products, and traditionally it has had a policy of refusing to comment on anything which has not been officially announced. Even within the company there is a culture of secrecy and silence, with individual teams unaware of what others in the same building are working on. Indeed, it is said that software and hardware teams working on two halves of the same product often have little contact with one another, vet somehow they manage to put out products so perfectly paired and crafted as the iPhone, where the hardware's touchscreen is so integral to the operation of the internal software.

Yet the iPhone was not Apple's first foray into the mobile phone market. Previous tie-ups with Motorola were little more than a branding exercise, with a cut-down iTunes player built into a range of compatible handsets, but hobbled so it could access no more than 100 tracks at a time. That is less than 10 albums, and at the time it left many convinced that Apple was doing no more than piggybacking a respected brand to see whether the music and phone combination really was viable.
   

 Apple's first foray into mobile phones with Motorola had limited success.

With 20/20 hindsight, we can see that this was indeed probably the case. The Motorola experiment was not a complete flop, but its success was muted and much of the criticism aimed at the venture focused on the Motorola hardware rather than the Apple software. If ever Apple needed convincing that it had to take the hardware development in house, this was probably the turning point. It had the right software; it just needed the vehicle through which to deliver it.

Traditional mobile phones are poorly-suited to delivering the kind of luxuriant interfaces and bright, high-resolution graphics we have come to expect from Apple. While their reliance on physical buttons for dialling,
texting and inputting data are too inflexible to perform the iPhone's most impressive tasks. What Apple needed was more akin to a mobile computer, but with Steve Jobs having already discounted a tablet PC running Mac OS X, and the company having burnt its fingers with Newton-line of MessagePad products, it needed to come up with something radically different, yet still familiar and unintimidating for the buying public.

Dow Jones, cited in an October 2006 issue of the New York Sun, reported a patent filing for a 'multi-functional hand-held device', which could act as both a mobile phone and a portable music player. Its invention was not attributed to Apple, but instead one Steven Hotelling. Who is he? A frequent patent filer based in San Jose, California, often named as inventor on Apple patents.

Other patents were more specifically Apple property. In late October 2006, CNN reported that Apple had been granted the patent for a speech-recognition technology that would enable a portable device to interpret

spoken commands, such as 'call home' or 'pick up voicemail'. A couple of weeks later, it was granted a patent for an 'actuating user interface for media player'. This described a successor to the scroll-wheel, which had been deemed unwieldy and fiddly on anything more complex than a simple music player. 'This is especially true when you consider that the functionality of hand-held devices have begun to merge into a single hand-held device (for example, smart phones),' the filing stated.

And, of course, now that we have seen how it works, we know just how different the iPhone's implementation of its music playback features is. Gone is the scroll-wheel, and in its place we have Cover Flow, which lets you flick back and forth through your album cover art. And can you do this with a single hand? Of course: hold it in one hand with your thumb around the front, and flick, flick, flick away. Cover Flow now appears on the scroll-wheel-based iPods with screens — the nano and classic — but the implementation is neither so appealing nor so effective. There is no opportunity to turn over a cover to read the track listing, and you do not get the same feeling of flicking through your CD collection as you do with the iPhone or the iPod touch.

The Newton MessagePad was Apple's first hand-held computer and was one of the first product lines that Steve Jobs axed when he rejoined the company with its buy out of NeXT.


On the exact same day as the patent for the new navigation device, Apple was granted a third patent, this time for a universal docking station for hand-held electronic devices. Such devices explicitly mentioned in the filing included 'a portable music player, a mobile telephone or a personal digital assistant'.

More and more often, the magical 't' word - telephone - was cropping up undisguised in Apple filings. No wonder the rumour mill was starting to churn out stories of a black ops department inside Apple working on a mobile phone to beat all others.

Then, in mid-November, the China Times reported that an iPhone product had been finalised and sent out for production at Foxconn's FushiKang plant, which by February 2007, it said, would be turning out between 500,000 and 600,000 units a month. Reporting the story, Apple Insider listed a raft of suppliers that had been signed up to the project, including AlusTech, which would manufacture its reported two-megapixel digital camera (which did indeed turn out to be a two-megapixel device) using lenses from Largan and Cmos sensors from Micron. Intel, Sharp, Tripod Technology, Broadcom and Sunrex were supplying the remaining components, while Catcher Technology, the company behind the iPod's external look and feci, would produce the iPhone casing.

So by late 2006, there was plenty of chatter in the market and lots of speculation, but not enough to save the Wikipedia administrators from deleting the iPhone entry on the grounds that it was based on speculation and rumour. 'This article is about a "future product", the "iPhone". However, there is no evidence that Apple intends to release a telephone, or that such a telephone is even in development. Unlike products such as Microsoft's Zune, which the company has stated it intends to release, Apple has never made any statements regarding the production of a phone. This page is not at all encyclopaedic, citing sources that are nothing more than rumours and speculation. Until there is something more than guesswork to back up the existence of such a product, this page should not exist,' wrote Paulus89, a Wikipedia contributor whose personal page carried a prominent anti-censorship badge.

Well, no. Apple had not officially commented on the presence or absence of an iPhone in its labs. But, then, until Jobs previewed the Apple TVj the only forthcoming products it had ever talked about before their actual launch were updates to the operating system, so it was not entirely surprising. In fairness to those Wikipedia contributors who made a good stab at putting together a forward-looking iPhone page, the closest anyone inside had come to giving official sanction to the project was an obscure comment from Apple chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer. As reported by Forbes, he 'whet appetites for a phone by telling analysts the company isn't "sitting around doing nothing" about the wireless market'.

Where Apple is concerned, that is as close to confirmation anyone was likely to get. With reports coming in from so many different sources, though, it was starting to look more likely than ever that the iPhone would have been on sale in the US by early spring 2007, and in Europe perhaps six months later. Neither of these proved wildly wrong.

The unveiling, and a battle over the iPhone name

The iPhone was finally released on 18 December 2006. Hang on, you are thinking, that can't be right. But it is. The iPhone — the very first iPhone ever — hit the market on 18 December 2006 and immediately sent Apple into a spin. Why? Because this iPhone was nothing like the sleek glass-and-metal gadget we now associate with the name. Instead, it was an Internet telephony device produced by network giant Cisco, which had owned the right to the iPhone name since it acquired the name's original owner, Infogear, in 2001.

Apple was its usual over-confident self and went ahead with the launch of its own iPhone on Tuesday 9 January 2007. 'iPhone it is,' MacUser magazine reported. 'In Apple's words not a single device, but three revolutionary products in one: a mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls and a "breakthrough" Internet communications device. It is also a camera and, at a push, a PDA.'

Steve Jobs was typically ebullient. The iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,' he said, ignoring the impracticalities of 'literal' time travel. 'We are all born with the ultimate pointing device — our fingers — and |the| iPhone uses them to create the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse.'

Competitors lined up to offer faint praise. Anssi Vanjoki, head of Nokia's multimedia unit, commented two days later that 'it is quite an interesting product, but it is lacking a few essential features such as 3G, which would enable fast data connections.' He further derided Apple's stated aim of capturing 1% of the mobile phone market as being 'not at a very high level', and claimed Apple's entry would boost the market and prove that Nokia's multimedia strategy - which he headed - was right.

The reaction from Motorola was barely any better. 'iPhone, iPhone, iPhone! I'm just bored of this damned question,' said European marketing manager Simon Thompson when asked about Apple's launch two months later. He did concede that it looked 'very pretty and white', according to quotes in MocoNews, but pointed out that while 'there will be a billion phones sold next year, on a good year there will be 10 million iPhones'.

Cisco, naturally, was the least impressed with Apple's launch, and that despite what it saw as infringement of its right to exclusive use of the iPhone name, Apple had gone ahead regardless.

Talks ensued, but it soon came to light that German law firm CMS had filed an application for Cisco's rights to use the name to be revoked on the basis that it had not used it in the previous five years. Many suspected Apple had put CMS up to the job, but nonetheless European law stated Cisco's dormant ownership of the name could still have cost it the right to use it on the Internet telephony product it launched mere days before Apple unveiled its own iPhone.

Apple claimed it had the right to use the name itself, as it was the first time it had been applied to a mobile phone, but Cisco fought back by issuing a trademark lawsuit against Apple for infringement.  'We think Cisco's trademark lawsuit is silly,' countered Natalie Kerris, Apple's director of music public relations. 'There are already several companies using the name iPhone for VoIP products and we believe that Cisco's US trademark registration is tenuous at best.'

However, it soon became clear Cisco was not looking for Apple to license the iPhone name from it in return for a healthy cash payment, but to open up the platform to interoperability. 'Fundamentally we wanted an open approach,' wrote Mark Chandler, Cisco's senior vice-president, on the company's blog. 'Our goal was to take that to the next level by facilitating collaboration with Apple. And we wanted to make sure to differentiate the brands in a way that could work for both companies and not confuse people, since our products combine both web access and voice telephony. That is it. Openness and clarity.'

If there is one thing for which Apple is famed - aside from consumer electronics enrobed in smooth white plastic - it is a lack of openness. Over the years, it has refused to license the digital rights management technology it uses to protect downloads from the iTuncs Store, or even allow manufacturers to build it into the firmware of their own music players.

Cisco claimed Apple had tried to license the iPhone brand in 2002, five years before the iPhone's eventual shipping date, and that when Cisco had refused Apple had launched a campaign of 'confusion, mistake and deception' in an attempt to muddy things. It had even, Cisco claimed, set up a separate company called Ocean Telecom Services to apply for an iPhone trademark of its own. Apple declined to discuss Ocean Telecom Services, and emails sent to it by MacUser magazine went unanswered.

Fortunately, Apple and Cisco continued to discuss the matter in a drive to avert court action, which would have been costly and could have been embarrassing for the party that came off the worse. Negotiations dragged on until late February 2007, with Cisco giving Apple extra time to prepare an adequate response and come to some kind of agreement over use of the name.
   

 Queues formed outside Apple Stores right across the US in anticipation of the iPhone's first appearance.

Finally, on 22 February, the two sides issued a joint statement. 'Both companies acknowledge the trademark ownership rights that have been granted, and each company will dismiss any pending actions regarding the action,' it said. 'In addition, Cisco and Apple will explore opportunities for interoperability in the areas of security, and consumer and enterprise communications.'

Finally, Apple was free to use the name as it saw fit and could progress with taking the iPhone to market. The next stage in that process was to obtain FCC authorisation to sell the product in the US, without which it would be little more than an expensive hunk of plastic. Approval is a length)' but important step, and when it finally came through on 18 May, the financial markets took note and Apple's share price immediately leapt 2.2% to $109.70.

Of course, there had been little doubt it would sail through, but Shaw Wu of American Technology Research, who is a regular commentator on business developments affecting Apple, confirmed that the increase could be directly attributed to the iPhone taking another important step towards the shop shelves. 'They are a brand-new player in this space, so it is a big deal,' he said.
The effect that this news had on Apple's share price was a welcome relief for both investors and the company alike, after a faked internal email sent through its own email server and purporting to come from a high-up member of the management team claimed the iPhone was running behind schedule and would not ship on time. This leaked email was widely reported on blog-based news sites, few of which checked the validity of its contents. Investors panicked, with many selling their holdings, leading to a dramatic decrease in the company's value. Whether it was a prank gone wrong or a piece of corporate malice has never been revealed.

The reality of the situation, however, was that Apple was devoting more resources to the iPhone than to just about anything else in production, even taking engineers off its operating system team to work on its firmware.

Nonetheless, Apple continued with its preparations for the launch of the iPhone, building units as quickly as it could, readying points of sale and banning all cameras from the back rooms of its stores. Employees were required to hand over cameras and camera phones as they turned up for work each day, and even Apple's own laptops, which sport cameras built into the tops of their screens, were temporarily outlawed.

And as the world entered its last iPhone-free week, analysts started to talk up its prospects like no product Apple had ever launched before, estimating that if all went to plan, it could conceivably sell in excess of half a million units in its first weekend on sale. Apple, clearly in agreement with them, reportedly put in calls to its key suppliers and upped its component orders, with the touchscreen, so important to the device's way of working, at the top of its shopping list.

Now it could only sit back and wait for the storm to make landfall.

The iPhone goes on sale

Finally, at 6pm on Friday 29 June 2007, the iPhone went on sale in the US. Customers had been queuing up outside the company's stores country-wide for days in advance of its release as it generated almost as much consumer excitement as the final Harry Potter novel, released just.over a month later. On that day, Apple closed all 164 of its US stores at 2 pm to give start time?

to prepare for the biggest launch in the company's history. Four hours later, the doors opened to serve customers on a first-come, first-served basis, with a strict limit of just two phones apiece for those lucky enough to get served before stocks ran out. 'Apple retail stores were created for this moment,' said Ron Johnson, Apple's senior vice-president of retail. 'To let customers touch and experience a revolutionary new product.'

The first person to get his hands on one was a guy called Greg, who started queuing outside the New York Apple Store four days early. Apple was not entirely appreciative of his dedication, with one Store employee quoted as saying, 'It is not necessary to camp out. Major Apple retail stores will be well stocked. |Customers] are just wasting their time camping out.'

The Internet was immediately awash with lengthy reviews as the myriad tech news sites did their best to out-do each other in the depth and authority of their coverage. Flickr galleries were quickly populated with pictures both of and taken by the iPhone, and Apple fan-boy blogs spoke of nothing but their owners' new-found loves for mobile communications.

The rest, as they say, is history. The iPhone did, indeed, turn out to be the biggest product launch in Apple's history, and despite what that unnamed Apple Store employee may have claimed, several shops did sell out, with wannabe customers ending up heading home empty handed.

The iPhone returns

Steve Jobs admitted at its UK launch several months later that a second iPhone was already in the works, and that the company was also making plans for the third edition, even before the first generation had proved its worth. That second edition, of course, turned out to be the iPhone 3G, which builds in some exciting new features, such as 3G connectivity courtesy of less power-hungry chips, and satellite positioning through the inclusion of a GPS receiver.

When it came to selling the iPhone 3G, Apple formed a completely new business model that more closely matched that operated with the vast majority of mobile phones available. Rather than charging the end-user for the full price of the device and then extracting a share of the subscription fees from the mobile phone network, Apple announced a price reduction in the hardware by allowing the networks to subsidise the device in return for ending the subscription revenue sharing agreement. 'The vast majority of agreements we have reached do not have those follow-on payments,' said Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officcr. 'So you can conclude that the vast majority of carriers do provide subsidies for the phone.'

Apple stuck with its existing network partners in rolling out the iPhone 3G, giving early adopters the chancc to upgrade their phones without having to extract themselves from an 18-month contract that still had time to run. As a bonus, O, in the UK said that it would not be asking for owners of the original iPhone to return the handsets, allowing them to hang on to them if they chose to upgrade to the iPhone 3G, and run them with a pay-as-you-go Sim in place of the monthly subscription.

The iPhone 3G was announced on 9 June 2008 at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers' Conference (WWDC) at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco — the same venue as the announcement of the original iPhone. Showing it off to the assembled developers and journalists, at the same time as the upgraded iPhone 2.0 software for original iPhones, Jobs described it as 'really nice', trumpeted its battery life as offering an 'industry-leading amount of [usage] time' and unveiled its GPS satellite navigation features.

It was all very impressive indeed, but not quite so impressive as the fact that, in line with rumours, Apple was upgrading its .Mac service to offer over-the-air synchronisation with the iPhone (and renaming it MobileMe to increase its appeal to PC users) as well as making it possible to install new applications on the device. All of this was bundled up in a slightly better sculptcd body than had housed the first edition of the iPhone. Yet for all its greatness there were a few disappointments: the lack of a higher resolution camera was one, and the fact that there wasn't a second camera in the front of the device to allow 3G video conferencing being another.

Third-party manufacturers immediately swung into action, announcing cases and add-ons for the new device within a matter of days, but competing mobile phone manufacturers were silent. In the days following the launch of the first iPhone, some competitors had discounted the device, and claimed that Apple, which has no experience of the mobile phone world, would struggle to make its mark. This time, however, those companies, which had now seen how successful the iPhone was in its first incarnation, were not nearly so bullish.

The iPhone 3GS is Apple's most advanced phone to date, but there is little doubt others will follow. 

Apple gave the world just over a month's notice of the new device, naming 11 July as the date the gadget would go on sale in 70 countries around the world. 'Next time you are in Malta and you need an iPhone 3G it will be there for you,' said Steve Jobs, perhaps to put to rest the minds of those who were only too aware that Apple rolls out its products in the US first before distribute them around the world once its native demand has been satisfied. It is a model that has served the company well, with it selling 6 million units of the original iPhone before it announced the update, and the company's chicf operating officer, Tim Cook, remaining confident that Apple would his its target of 10 million iPhones shipped by the end of the year.

However, it did not deliver everything that we might have hoped for. The camera remained stubbornly stuck at its original two-megapixel resolution and there was still no way to buy applications from any source other than Apple's own authorised Store. With the iPhone 3GS, Apple upped the resolution of the camera, added a compass and made the device much faster, and while apps must still be downloaded from its own Store, the iPhone is evolving, and it is sure to continue doing so. Keep your eyes peeled for the fourth generation...