The first iPhones won praise for their sleek design and elegant touch-screen, but Apple's new computer phones, arrived last week, will use the power of software to make the device like no phone ever seen.
Whether it's faster Web speeds, security for business users or using the phone's direction-finding capability to let it act as a game controller or location-aware device, it's software, not hardware, that should define the iPhone from here out.
Get over how it looks. It's the power of the computer inside, combined with supporting technologies that let it perform many powerful tasks no phone has managed before.
IPhone gaming features are a good example. A built-in accelerometer lets the device know when it's being tilted or swung, allowing it to act like a Nintendo Wii game controller, not just an input device where the user punches buttons in four directions to control game movements.
Similarly, the iPhone's Global Positioning System (GPS) chip allows software to go far beyond obvious functions like maps. Web search or photo-sharing sites can now assume a user's location and adjust what they see to their local surroundings. San Francisco start-up Stitcher (http://stitcher.com/) introduced software in February that detects what streaming audio news iPhone users like and lets them "stitch" audio programs into personalised radio stations.
With GPS, Stitcher can deliver local news, weather or sports, co-founder Mike Ghaffary said, calling it "YouTube for audio" - for when users are driving or unable to watch video.