The iPhone is amazingly amazing: Steve Jobs, Apple chief executive, had some substantive points to make in his address launching a new version of the mobile phone, not least that it will be cheaper (because of network operator subsidies); but he wanted to talk about its amazingness most of all. The iPhone has changed expectations of smartphones, but while the introduction of subsidies is a sensible move, it is also an admission that the device has failed to change the industry’s business model.

The iPhone may not be amazing but it is rather clever. Apple, along with another spectacular success in consumer electronics, Nintendo, has shown the importance of improving the user interface. The iPhone’s touch screen makes mobile web browsing less difficult, and such interface innovations seem to have a direct appeal to consumers that whizzy new functions do not.