Apple unveiled its new cellular phone, iPhone, to the world this week with great fanfare. Of course the functionality of the iPod is built in, but it also has some other interesting features as well. Anyone familiar with a Mac will know what a widget is. For those unfamiliar with Macs, a widget is a small application that can be run on any computer running OS X. Some common examples are clocks, calculators, stock reports and weather reports. There are countless examples of widgets available for free to the general public. The iPhone will be running OS X and therefore will allow the user to quickly customize their “device” with widgets that meet their needs.

Navigating the Internet on a portable device other than a laptop has in general, been a horrible experience for the user. The iPhone attempts to make web browsing on a small screen a much more user friendly experience. The iPhone has the safari web browser installed and attempts to duplicate the experience of sitting on front of a laptop or desktop computer. Even though the resolution of the iPhone is only 360 x 240, Safari allows the user to see the whole page and then by tapping the screen, zoom in to the content you want to view or read. It sounds similar to a “Snap” preview, a javascript plugin for Internet Explorer that allows browsers to mouseover a link and see a preview of the website before zooming in on a specific area.

The most impressive feature built in to the iPhone is its ability to connect to wireless networks. Connecting to the Internet on existing cell phones is slow and requires the user to pay for data transfers. The experience is both expensive and unfriendly. If the iPhone is truly going to be a web surfing/email device, they needed to break away from relying on the cellular network to provide the data transfers. With all the free wireless networks popping up around the city, surfing the Internet on your iPhone would similar to the experience of using your laptop, just a smaller screen. I wonder if it would be possible to install ip telephony software like skype or vonage to make free long distance calls? Hmmmm.

Are you going to be able to view Video Openhouse Tours on your iPhone? Yes, but not anytime soon. The iPhone isn’t available in the US until June and won’t be released in Europe for until next year. Unfortunately, there are no release dates for the iPhone in Canada.

Thanks to Steve over at Ubertor for drawing my attention to a great blog at the Future Of Real Estate Marketing. The post is an overview of the Inman News’ Real Estate Connect Conference. The author leaves the readers with a few thoughts including his predictions for online video in the real estate industry under the heading, “Video Killed the Virtual Tour“. Essentially, he is forecasting that this is the year that video will make an impact on the industry. Costs and technological barriers have fallen, making the use of video more accessible than ever before. If 2006 was all about aggregating real estate data, then 2007 is about giving context to the data and “video does just that”.

Panoramic or 360 tours aren’t dead … yet. But they are an old technology that is quickly being replaced by a far superior medium for virtually showcasing any home to the online world!