SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs confirmed months of speculation Tuesday by unveiling a new mobile phone and a set-top box that allows people to stream video from their computers to their televisions.
Jobs said Apple's iPhone would "reinvent" the telecommunications sector and "leapfrog" past the current generation of hard-to-use smart phones.
"Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything," he said during his keynote address at the annual Macworld Conference and Expo.
"It's very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. ... Apple's been very fortunate in that it's introduced a few of these."
Apple TV, as the video box is known, is designed to bridge computers and television sets so users can more easily watch their downloaded movies on a big screen.
A prototype of the gadget was introduced by Jobs in September when Apple announced it would sell TV shows and movies through its iTunes online store.
The product could be as revolutionary to digital movies as Apple's iPod music player was to digital music.
Both devices liberate media from the computer, allowing people to enjoy digital files without being chained to a desktop or laptop.
"It's really, really easy to use," Jobs told the crowd at San Francisco's Moscone Center before demonstrating the system with a video clip of "The Good Shepherd."
"It's got the processing horsepower to do the kinds of things we like to do."
Quote:
Capping literally years of speculation on perhaps the most intensely followed unconfirmed product in Apple's history -- and that's saying a lot -- the iPhone has been announced today in collaboration with Cingular. Yeah, we said it: "iPhone," the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it'd been nothing more than a twinkle in Stevie J's eye (comments, Cisco?). Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device (that's frickin' thin, by the way) include a 3.5-inch wide touchscreen display with multi-touch support, 2 megapixel cam, 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth with EDR, WiFi, and quadband GSM radio with EDGE -- and amazingly, it somehow runs OS X. A proximity sensor disables the touchscreen when it's close to your face, while the iTunes support rocks CoverFlow.
Well now we know that iTV has officially become Apple TV. It's real folks: we got 802.11 b/g AND 802.11n, USB 2.0, Ethernet, WiFi, HDMI, bunch of standard outs, plus a 40GB hard drive -- all powered by an Intel CPU. So resolution is only 720p -- looks like a few folks are gonna be out of luck, but TV manufacturers are sure gonna be happy to sell all those new sets. Not just one, two or three but five computers can connect to the Apple TV box, making a true hub for all your PCs. You can watch content stored on your rig -- movies, TV shows, photos, etc. -- and you can also pull streaming vid directly off sites like...Apple.com! Plus, the box will even grab content from PCs outside of your house -- finally, we can watch all the great swag that our rich can afford. Interested? You'll be able to grab one immediately for $299.
http://WWW.APPLE.COM
http://www.engadget.com/ & http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/01/09/apple.macworld.ap/index.html
keynote: http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/live-from-macworld-2007-steve-jobs-keynote/
you don't even feel it when you do and when you don't have it with you 
