The events in New Orleans maxed out the bandwidth of the News channels, so Apple had to compete for attention. Steve Jobs, with his talent for publicity, did well anyway. There had been too much speculation about the “iPhone” for it to deliver any surprises and thus press comment on it has been muted, expressing a little disappointment. It cannot play music as your ring tone – the carriers would not like that – they sell rings tones for $1.5 to $3 which is a good deal more than the iTunes price of 99 cents a song. The song capacity is low (at 1000 songs) and the only surprise is flashing lights in the side of the phone to sync with the music. It’s the kind of ostentatious feature that will appeal to the teens and irritate everyone else. Worst of all is that you cannot download songs over the air; you have to pull them in from your PC.

However this is no great surprise, because the carriers will want a cut of the action for downloading songs over the air. Who’s going to want to pay their tax? Nobody I think. Already there are mobile phones that support WiFi, and WiFi is getting so pervasive that the next generation of phones will probably all be equipped.

Hey carriers, listen. Give it up. Carry the music just for call charges – otherwise you’ll lose all the business. You don’t have a sustainable monopoly of any kind. WiFi is going to eat it for breakfast. The mesh networks are coming. You have to compete on value and convenience. Do you hear me?

Anyway Steve Jobs wrong-footed everyone by announcing the “iPod nano”, which no-one expected. This has drawn a good deal of attention because it is one third the thickness of the typical iPod and will appeal to the teens. It’s all memory stick, but more memory stick than was in the iPod Shuffle. The surprise got him his column inches and I’m sure he’s happy with the coverage.

The next version of the “iPhone” will be the interesting one. Apple is not going to be happy with the limitations of this version.