FCC Chairman loves iPhone

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

The iPhone made a brief appearance Tuesday during the keynote speeches at the CTIA Wireless 2007 trade show in Orlando Florida, and was definitely the highlight of the day.

AT and T Chief Operating Officer Randall Stephenson pulled the mystical Apple cell phone from his pocket during his speech, to the fanfare of many camera flashes, as everybody sat up in their seats.

Apple whisked the closely guarded device away from the convention center right after the speech, but before the keynote, Kevin Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission got his hands on it and played with the operational gadget a bit.

"He spent more time with it than I did," Stephenson said in an interview afterward. For a minute, "It seemed like he wouldn't give it back," Stephenson joked.

It was Martin who quickly figured out the touch-screen navigation that Stephenson demonstrated minutes later during his keynote speech. Tuesday was only the second time Stephenson had held or seen an iPhone.

"I held it once in a Cingular board meeting," but that unit wasn't operational, he said. "Today was the first time I could actually navigate it."

The iPhone is expected to go on sale in June of this year, and will initially be exclusive to AT and T's Cingular Wireless division.