History of iPhone

The genesis of the iPhone was Jobs' direction that Apple engineers investigate touch-screens. At the time he had been considering having Apple work ontablet PCs. Many have noted the device's similarities to Apple's previous touch-screen portable device, the Newton MessagePad, the iPhone is nearly all screen. Its form factoris credited to Apple's head of design,Jonathan Ive.Comments made by Jobs in April 2003 at the "D: All Things Digital" executive conference expressed his belief that tablet PCs and traditional PDAs were not good choices as high-demand markets for Apple to enter, despite many requests made to him that Apple create another PDA. He did believe that cell phones were going to become important devices for portable information access, and that what cell phones needed to have was excellent synchronization software. At the time, instead of focusing on a follow-up to their Newton PDA, Jobs had Apple put its energies into the iPod, and the iTunes software (which can be used to synchronize content with iPod devices), released January 2001.On September 7, 2005, Apple and Motorola ROKR E1, the first mobile phone to use iTunes. Jobs was unhappy with the ROKR, feeling that having to compromise with a non-Apple designer (Motorola) prevented Apple from designing the phone they wanted to make. In September 2006, Apple discontinued support for the ROKR and released a version of iTunes that included references to an as-yet unknown mobile phone that could display pictures and video. On January 9, 2007, Jobs announced the iPhone at the Macworld convention, receiving substantial media attention,June 11, 2007 announced at the Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference that the iPhone would support third-party applications using the Safari engine on the device. Third-parties would create the Web 2.0 applications and users would access them via the internet. Such applications appeared even before the release of the iPhone; the first being "OneTrip", a program meant to keep track of the user's shopping list. On June 29, Apple released version 7.3 of iTunes to coincide with the release of the iPhone. This release contains support for iPhone service activation and syncing.

iPhone

The iPhone allows conferencing, call holding, call merging, caller ID, and integration with other cellular network features and iPhone functions. For example, a playing song fades out when the user receives a call. Once the call is ended the music fades back in.
The iPhone includes a Visual Voicemail feature in conjunction with AT&T which allows users to view a list of current voicemail messages on-screen, without having to call into their voicemail. Unlike most other systems, messages can be listened to in a non-chronological order, by choosing messages from an on-screen list. AT&T completely reworked their voicemail infrastructure to accommodate this new feature designed by Apple.
SMS messages are presented chronologically in a mailbox format similar to Mail, which places all text from recipients together with replies. Text messages are displayed in speech bubbles (similar to iChat) under each recipient's name.

The iPhone is a multimedia and Internet-enabled quad-band GSM EDGE-supported mobile phone by Apple. The iPhone's functions include those of a camera phone and a multimedia player. It also offers Internet services including e-mail, text messaging, web browsing, Visual Voicemail, and local Wi-Fi connectivity. User input is accomplished via a multitouch screen with virtual keyboard and buttons.

source:(http://Wikipedia.org)