It's been the subject of a ridiculous amount of speculation and today we've finally seen the result of all the hard work that Apple has been doing behind the scenes with Steve Jobs' launch of the iPhone at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

Like all Apple products the iPhone is a pretty sexy device, but doesn't exactly present a radical rethinking of the mobile phone as we know it. Rather the iPhone is more along the lines of a good looking iMate and seems to largely replicate the efforts that Microsoft and hardware partners have made in the mobile phone space with it's Window's Mobile offering.

That's not to say that the iPhone won't become an indispensable accessory for Apple fans the world over, but it's going to be entering into a very mature market with some pretty hefty competition, unlike when Apple entered into the digital music player market with the iPod. And don't think this is going to be the device that will replace your iPod - with a choice of between 4GB and 8GB models the iPhone has enough space to store a medium sized library of music but not enough to store a big library of songs, photos and video.

The iPhone features WiFi, Bluetooth, OSX, a 2 Megapixel Camera and either 4GB or 8GB of flash memory and a touch screen which doubles as a virtual keyboard and is being launched in the US exclusively through mobile phone provider Cingular. The rest of the world will have to wait I guess.

[Via Apple.com]