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iPO at Macworld - Apple Adds New Software and Features to iPhone

SAN FRANCISCO -- Apple announced Tuesday five new apps and features for the iPhone. During his Macworld Expo keynote, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced a new location-service in Maps, the ability to add Webclips to your iPhone, the ability to change your home screens, and to have multiple home screens, the ability to send an SMS text message to multiple recipients, and support for the also-new movie rentals from iTunes.

Mr. Jobs demonstrated Maps' new interface, which includes the ability to find your current location, and then to get directions to whatever destination you might want. In addition, users can drop pins onto the map wherever they wish, and drag those pins around as needed. Information about the location represented by the pin is then available, as are directions.

During his keynote address, Mr. Jobs said that the location feature relies on technologies by Skyhook Wireless and AT&T cell phone tower triangulation to determine one's location, and he thanked the developers at Google for being good partners.

Webclips is a new feature that allows you to put a Web page on your iPhones hom screen. Clicking on that icon takes the user directly to whatever point on that Web page the user may have zoomed in on.

While this might seemingly make the iPhone cluttered, Apple also added multiple home screens, and the ability to edit those screens to your hearts's content. When in edit mode, you can move all of the icons around in your current screen, or even another screen, just by dragging it around on the screen.

The new SMS text feature is fairly self-explanatory -- it allows users to send the same SMS text message to multiple reciepients. Lastly, users will be able to take their movies rentals from their Macs to their iPods.

The software update is free to iPod owners, and will ship immediately. New iPhones come equipped with the update today, according to Apple. The iPhone Web page at Apple's site has a video and other additional information about the new features.

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BurmaYank said:

member since 22 Oct 2003 with 19 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

WHAT! No Copy/Paste editing??!!!!!!!

- this relatively worthless fluff shouldn't be called a real upgrade, then. And will we never get Flash?

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