iPhone Reality: The day Apple changed Cell phones forever.

This is one of those nerd moments that you never forget.  You know, like everyone knows where they were when the Challenger shuttle blew up, when 9/11 happened, when the Iraq war started, etc.

Well, I will be able to tell my grandkids where I was and what I was doing the day the iPhone was introduced to the world.

This morning, Tuesday,January 9, 2007, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA, Steve Jobs simply rocked the world of consumer electronics and personal technology to its very foundations.

It was a complete paradigm shift of historic, utterly epic proportions.  Instantly, with the unveiling of this gadget, Jobs and Apple have made all other cell phones obsolete and utterly unimportant and pathetic in comparison. 

When he revealed the 1st images and specs of the device, I immediately looked at my phone (a bulky, heavy, battleship grey, butt-ugly Cingular 8125) and saw how utterly primitive it looked and felt.

My god.  In one fell swoop, Jobs and Apple swept aside the entire cell phone industry and "leap-frogged 5 years ahead" (as Jobs claimed) of everyone else.  Really.  Smartphones, flip phones, Blackberrys all seem hopelessly trinkety and toy like next to the sleek, beautiful, thin, iPhone.

Some specs:

• 160ppi Super High Resolution screen
• Wide-screen Video iPod with touchscreen controls
• Internet communicator that includes full rich-text HTML email and SMS Texting
• 4 or 8 GB of Flash memory ($499 for 4 GB, $599 for 8 GB)
• 4.8 ounces
• 11.6 mm thin (thinner than the Cingular Blackjack or the Motorola Q)
• 5 hours battery life for video watching and 16 hours for regular phone use
• Runs OS X
• Runs a full version of Safari, the Mac web browser
• Runs the same Widgets available on the Mac in OS X
• Access to Push Email in partnership with Yahoo!
• Access to Google Maps in partnership with Google
• Visual voice-mail, a feature co-provided with Cingular that allows you to visually pick and choose what voice-mail messages you want to listen to without having to listen to them sequentially
• scrolling Cover Album Art from with your iTunes library

The device has a single button on the front; the 'Home' button, that controls navigation to the main features of the phone, like the iPod library, email, SMS texting, widgets, etc.

Everything else is pretty much software-based, including a technology called "multi-touch" that allows you to "touch" your music, scroll through your library, zoom in to web pages and pictures, etc.

Of course, the feasability of just 5 hours battery life if you watch videos, the workability of extended typing on the on-screen virtual keyboard, "only" 8 GB of storage, 720i video only, etc.  These are all things that remain to be reviewed when the iPhone makes its much anticipated debut in June 2007.

In the mean time, judging by the soaring of Apple's stock as Jobs spoke and the plunging of the stocks of Palm, Motorola and RiM, I suspoect that there will be a whole lot of "back to the drawing board" in the labs of many a hi-tech firm in Silicon Valley and other places around the planet.

Meanwhile, Apple has truly upset the "Apple" cart with this annoncement.  It sure is an exciting time to be alive, let me tell you.