If you've registered for information about the iPhone on the UK Apple site, then you'll have noticed the following email that's being pinged out today. If not, here are the salient points.
"iPhone arrives on 9 November. It features a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet device with rich HTML email, web browsing, searching and maps."
Getting ready for iPhone
If you've decided to buy an iPhone on 9 November, Apple suggests some preparatory measures you can take to make your first day with iPhone a suitably clap-happy one.
Contacts: "To get ready for iPhone, organise your contacts in [Address Book or Entourage on a Mac, or Outlook or Outlook Express on a PC] and make sure they're up to date with the latest phone numbers and email addresses. If you have a lot of contacts on your current SIM card, make sure to migrate them to the address book on your computer."
Note: the iPhone doesn't recognise contacts on a SIM card, so you'll have to transfer all your contacts from your current phone to your PC or Mac, then sync them to the iPhone. The iPhone stores contact data in its memory and not on the SIM card.
Calendar: "If you don't already use [iCal or Entourage on the Mac, or Outlook on a PC] to manage your appointments, now is a great time to start, so you'll be ready to sync when your iPhone arrives."
Note: the calendar is fairly basic on the iPhone and doesn't yet offer syncing to online calendars. It's a step better than the iPod touch calendar, however, which doesn't enable you to add new entries at all.
E-mail: "iPhone works with the most popular email systems - including Yahoo Mail, AOL, Google Mail and .Mac Mail. iTunes will make email setup on iPhone easy by automatically syncing the settings from email accounts stored in Mail on a Mac or Outlook on a PC. iPhone also works with almost any industry-standard POP3 and IMAP email system."
Note: The iPhone is capable of receiving full HTML emails and can also open graphics attachments, PDFs, Word and Excel files. Such attached documents can be browsed using the multi-touch system in the same way as you'd browse a web page in Safari.
"To set up your iPhone, you'll need an account with Apple's iTunes Store. If you already have an iTunes account, make sure you know your account name and password. If you don't have an account, you should set one up now to save time later."
