Apple Unveils Its iPhone

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The New York Sun

SAN FRANCISCO — The chief executive officer of Apple Computer Inc., Steven Jobs, introduced a mobile phone based on its best-selling iPod device and changed the company’s name to Apple Inc., highlighting its reliance on consumer electronics.

The iPhone will be available in America in June and cost $499 for a 4-gigabyte version and $599 for 8 gigabytes. The phones are widescreen models of the video iPods, with a touch screen, Mr. Jobs said yesterday at the Macworld Expo conference in San Francisco.

Apple shares jumped to close at a record high on optimism the iPhone will increase sales by more than $1 billion. Mr. Jobs said he aims to sell 10 million units in 2008, capturing 1% of the cellphone market. Apple will challenge Palm Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd., which are struggling to fuel sales of their own multifunction phones.

“The bar has been raised” for phones, a fund manager at Thrivent Financial for Lutherans in Appleton, Wis., James Grossman, said. The firm oversees $65 billion including Apple shares. “There will always be a place for the discrete music player but the broader market will engulf that function into other devices.”

Mr. Jobs, 51, also yesterday introduced Apple TV, a $299 set-top box enabling users to send movies, TV shows, and other files from their computers to their televisions.

The iPhone, with a black face and silver back, is larger than the iPod Nano. The 3.5-inch color screen takes up most of the face of the device, which Mr. Jobs said is the thinnest smart phone on the market at 11.6 millimeters thick. The display works horizontally and vertically. The device, which has a built-in camera, runs the Safari Web browser and Apple’s Macintosh operating system software, will go on sale in Europe in the fourth quarter and Asia in 2008.

“We have reinvented the phone,” Mr. Jobs told the audience gathered at the Moscone West conference center. Dressed in his trademark jeans and black turtleneck, Mr. Jobs played a voicemail on the phone from an Apple director, Vice President Gore, and made the first public call on the device to designer Jonathan Ive.

The chief executive officer of Google Inc., Eric Schmidt, also an Apple board member, and a founder of Yahoo Inc., Jerry Yang, both joined Mr. Jobs onstage to tout the product and links to the iPhone to their Internet search and e-mail services.

Apple filed more than 200 patents on the iPhone, including one for the touch-screen technology for controlling phone, messaging, music, and video functions.

A UBS AG analyst, Benjamin Reitzes, based in New York, told investors yesterday that the iPhone is “a complete stunner.” Before the announcement Mr. Reitzes predicted the phone may generate $1.5 billion in sales. Bank of America’s Keith Bachman said Mr. Jobs’s prediction for 10 million phones in 2008 “sounds low.”

Apple had sales of $19.3 billion for the year ended September 30.

Shares of Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple rose $7.10, or 8.3%, to $92.57 in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading, the biggest gain in almost six months. They gained 18% last year after more than doubling in 2005.

Cingular Wireless, the largest mobile-phone carrier in America, will be an exclusive partner. The CEO of Cingular, Stan Sigman, said he entered the multiyear agreement without even seeing the device.


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