As the multitude of Apple faithful and acolytes were generously applauding and giving their chief priest a standing ovation, Jobs unveiled the iPhone, one of the IT world’s worst-kept secrets for quite some time. And based on the smart phone’s technical specifications, it would seem that each clairvoyant and diviner, even those with the most bizarre forecasts, saw at least part of their claims turning out true. Apple’s smart phone is a mobile phone that plays digital music and videos, connects to the internet, and so much more.

Scores of industry executives and investors must be losing sleep over the iPhone’s coming. But do they really need worry and suffer from bouts of insomnia?

What makes the iPhone quite interesting (and more importantly for Apple’s investors and stakeholders: a sure hit and future bestseller) is not so much what it is designed to do. Rather, the iPhone will make its mark by how it does those things.

Unlike today’s smart phone models, the iPhone does not sport sets of dedicated buttons, switches or built-in plastic keyboards. Instead, it comes with an almost bland stretch of screen and a single button beneath it. This expanse of screen, however, uses a multi-tap touch screen technology, which enables the screen to become a virtual keyboard or console depending on applications summoned by the user, or the phone’s proximity to the user’s face or ears as detected by the iPhone’s set of sensors.

An accelerometer even senses if the user rotates the device from portrait to landscape and changes the display’s orientation accordingly.

Special mention should be made of how the iPhone connects to the internet. Unlike most of today’s web-enabled mobile phones, Jobs’ phone uses a full-featured browser to display full versions of web sites, not watered down WAP editions.

Like what it did for the MP3 player market with the iPod, Apple is bringing to the mobile phone industry an emphasis on user values. Some industry analysts in fact are wondering why only Apple seems to understand the concept of user values as applied to consumer electronics.

The iPod, on the other hand, was as functional as the MP3 players that came before it, and was built with ease of use as its foremost consideration. Other MP3 players might have sounded better, featured more functions, and offered much bigger storage capacities and longer-lasting batteries than the iPod, but Apple’s digital music player was miles ahead in the user-friendliness department. Its highly intuitive controls redefined simplicity, while its design created new aesthetic standards for electronics.

And while some industry analysts promptly dismissed the iPod as nothing more than a curiosity bound to fail, millions of consumers proved Jobs’ assessment of the consumer pulse was correct.

A few hours after Jobs wowed the faithful with his company’s much-awaited smart phone cum Swiss knife of an electronics device, Cisco Systems, Inc. sued Apple, claiming that the computer company violated its trademark.

The world’s largest manufacturer of networking equipment has asked the federal court in San Francisco to bar Apple from using the "iPhone" name. Cisco has told the court that it has held the trademark since 2000, and has in fact used the name to brand a series of internet-enabled phones.

Apparently, the two companies had been negotiating for a licensing deal over the right to use the name up to when Apple announced the iPhone smart phone. Apple, for its part, claims that it has not violated Cisco’s trademark. It asserts that Cisco’s iPhone products are quite different from Apple’s iPhone.

Executives of companies that manufacture mobile phones are certainly having serious bouts of iPhone-induced headaches. While large doses of aspirin might not do the trick, these thoughts might help alleviate their pains. The iPhone is sure to be a bestseller once enough numbers are out in the market, but there are bound to be a speed bump or two along the smart phone’s way to bestseller land.

The mobile phone market might yet prove to be quite a different ballgame for Apple compared with its experience with the MP3 player market about five years ago. Levels of competition in the wireless market are quite high, and Apple’s lack of experience and expertise in phone making could give Jobs and company a serious handicap.

Moreover, millions of consumers already have mobile phones and a good portion of them already listen to their favorite MP3 songs on their iPods. Try as it might, Apple could not help but see the iPhone cannibalizing some iPod sales. Also, its relatively stiff price tags, US9 for the 4GB model and US9 for the 8GB version, might leave the iPhone with only the corporate buyers for potential customers. These users are usually the only ones who can afford and justify such expenses for a new smart phone.

Then again, the law of inertia might keep executives from crossing over to the iPhone’s fold. After all, their thumbs have gotten used to inputting text using the keypad of a Blackberry or Palm’s Treo.

Apple faces several hurdles before it could realize its target of cornering at least one percent of the mobile phone market, or about 10 million units in 2008.

Unlike the iPod, which helped Apple build and enhance a well-oiled sales channel, the company faces a daunting task in selling and arranging subsidized bundled deals with highly competitive telecommunications network operators across the world.

The iPhone’s support for GSM mobile phone standard means that a majority of the world’s mobile phone subscribers are potential buyers. But some networks are in the process of rolling out their 3G networks to replace their existing GSM networks. In this regard, the iPhone is not future-proof, although some Apple executives have said that future releases of the smart phone will come with 3G support.

The iPhone also lacks VoIP telephony support, and has no mobile TV or FM radio, although, the absence of the last two features is perfectly understandable. Why install features that might harm the iTunes’ sales performance?

Apple’s foray into the mobile phone market is sending shivers down the spines of the industry’s leaders. After all, Apple’s reputation for solid product design and strong marketing strategies are not without real-life basis. The iPhone (or whatever it might be called in the future depending on the outcome of Cisco’s legal challenge to Apple’s use of the name) seems set to becoming a bestseller.

Based on design, functionality, and ease-of-use principles that made the iPod the leading MP3 player in the market, how can the iPhone miss?

The question is: Why could the other mobile phone makers not see it coming?