數位生活

Indeed, the "preverberations" from Apple Inc.'s plan to bring its addictive design simplicity and elegance to wireless with the iPhone is palpable across a good many announcements slated for CTIA Wireless 2007, which opened on Tuesday.

While the prototype that Apple unveiled back in January instantly drew drools with its slender, sleek looks, the real test will be whether the iPhone's large touch-screen interface rewrites the rules for ease of use when it becomes available in June. As Motorola Inc.'s boom-and-bust fortunes with the Razr show, style isn't everything.

There's sure to be plenty of hyperventilation about mobile video and music at the show. So a core theme emerging among this week's planned product launches is how to make these devices less confusing as they get crammed and cramped with multimedia capabilities.

One such offering comes from a small, youth-oriented cellular service named Helio, a joint venture between Earthlink Inc. and Korea's SK Telecom Co. that on Monday unveiled a $295 handset called Ocean.

Billed as the first "dual-slider," the Ocean marks one of the more