Today Steve Jobs unveiled the long-anticipated iPhone to the public. We gotta say this thing is amazing! Featuring a new input method called “Multi-touch”, which allows you to use several fingers at once to input “gestures”, the phone also features Wi-Fi (and EDGE) along with a version of Apple’s web browser Safari - this is possible, because the phone’s operating system is MAC OS X!
This is really exciting, because this phone has a full featured, standards-minding web browser out of the box and the connectivity features to make use of it. Apple’s website for the iPhone internet features has an animation where you can see the browser in action.
It looks like web pages can be zoomed - apparently continuously - using gestures. There seems to be a logic that zoomes certain elements on the screen, such as images or article headings, if you perform a gesture or simply click on it. Also the phone recognizes if you hold it in landscape or portrait mode and sets the screen orientation accordingly.
I wonder if you can also click links in any zooming level, doesn’t look like - but i would assume so. The screen resolution of the iPhone is 320x480 and the display is a very high-res one with 160ppi.
We’re looking forward to how the web browser performs on the iPhone in reality and what implications this has for us as developers. One thing interesing to know would be what the default width in the web browser is - the demo animation above shows a wikipedia page at the end that seems to be smaller in width than the NYT page from the beginning of the demo - but we’ll see, hopefully soon.