Emulate the iPhone on your handset

Having watched the new Apple iPhone demo, it’s hard to imagine anyone not wanting to throw their old handset in the nearest lake and rush to the Apple store when it’s finally released. After being seduced by the iPhone’s touch-screen interface, its slick iPod features and the drop-dead gorgeous browsing and email apps, I can’t bring myself to look my current phone in the face anymore.

Luckily, there are a few apps that can bring a taste of what’s to come from the iPhone to your current device. The Java-based iPhone Theme lets you apply that sexy Apple menu screen to your phone, which you can customize to control your various tools and applications. Watching the demo of the iPhone’s Contact system got me a little hot under the collar, and it’s possible to replicate this, albeit in a rather crude way, on your Pocket PC. SSContact features the same slide-down option, one-click dialling and contact management features, to give you a little practice for when the real thing arrives.

If you have a Mac at the moment, you might want to try out iSoftPhone, a VOIP application that replicates the iPhone, or count down to the launch of the wonder-device with the iPhone Widget, which delivers all the latest news on the product to your desktop in the form of an iPhone-style display.