All Geeks in the world will have by now watched Steve Jobs yesterday's Keynote Speech at Macworld 2007 on the new Apple's iPhone. First thing I want to say, Damn you Kevin Rose ! You got it right 'again' this time mate !

Second thing, I have no difficulty in giving Apple the crown for the King of Usability ! I mean look at that software (how would you call it ? 'Mac OS X Mobile' ?), it's just beautiful ! It's going to up the ante for competition among big vendors, such as Microsoft and Symbian. These vendors will be expected to at least match iPhone's usability if not features, and they will need to do this fairly quick, or they will lose their market share like they did with iPod.

Here are some of my thoughts:

'Mac OS X Mobile Edition'

Sometimes it is good to be the last in the market, because you can see and analyse what others had done before you, take the best of each of them and learn from their mistakes. This can be seen very clear, especially in the Mobile software market, which has been mature quite a long time. We have among the big players: Nokia/Sony Ericsson/Symbian, Palm/Treo, Blackberry, and then of course Microsoft own MS Windows Mobile. These guys have been in the market almost as long as I can remember and producing pretty robust mobile software.

Apple's engineer didn't have to do much other than analysing each of those implementations and came up with a better one And I think they've done a very good job on this.

Indeed, if you watch the Keynote, you can see that Steve was taking a potshot at each sample of these camps, namely Nokia, Treo and Blackberry

Multi-Touch

This is cool stuff, although most of the functionalities are not entirely new, IMHO. Most of Smartphones running MS Windows Mobile are equipped with touchscreen, as also the latest Sony Ericsson Walkman mobile.

But again Apple has brought a new usability features into this somehow 'awkward' User Interface. My favourite was the 'Pinch'

I'm not too sure about the on-screen keyboard though. Currently it's quite hard to touch-type with small keys like that, at least in my PDA.

Widgets Galore

One of the features that available in iPhone is the Widgets, i.e. small application that is specially written to do a few simple things, like showing you the Whether forecast or a Live Stock Ticker.

Now, I believe on the Desktop version of Mac OS X, they've got already tons of these little app things, I'm sure it won't be that difficult to convert these desktop widgets to the mobile counterpart (or maybe it doesn't need any conversion at all). Live RSS feed of your choice everyone !

Quad Band + Edge

Now, one of the iPhone rumours was saying that the iPhone will do only CDMA. I am so 'glad' that Apple chose to go for GSM/3G radio instead. This means the iPhone will be usable in Europe Furthermore, it means that I might be able to get my 'grubby mits' on it when it comes out in the US, provided of course that they don't Network-Lock the phone (which is most likely actually).

Google and Yahoo

I thought it was so cool to see Apple, Google and Yahoo together on the same stage. It looks like the iPhone might 'save' Yahoo from experiencing a slow-but-certain-death, which was indicated by some of the news lately.

And there is no modern internet gadgetry these days, that is comlete without Google. I don't care about the Maps, just give me YouTube Widget please !

As a note, you can already get Yahoo Go (Search, Email and Messenger), and Google Suite (Gmail, Maps), right NOW on your phone. I have those stuff running on my Nokia N73 (Symbian S60 3rd Edition).

I have to say it was a joy to watch Steve demo-ing the iPhone, I was close to tears. What would be interesting to see is if Apple could make the promised June release date.

Check iPhone in Flickr.

David Pogue's hands-on with iPhone (he's confirming my concern about the keyboard).

Gizmodo 15-minutes hands-on.