Yesterday was an odd day in Las Vegas. Despite the fact that the leading lights of the computing and consumer electronics worlds are gathered here for CES, Apple stole the limelight (and the headlines) with the announcement of its iPhone .

There might be over 2,700 exhibitors here, showing everything from the latest high-def TVs to digital photo frames, but all most of the 140,000 attendees are talking about is Apple's iPhone.

While we certainly expected Apple to launch an iPod phone, what we didn't expect was such a slick, desirable device. I've been holding off buying an iPod for years - mainly because everybody has one and there are other devices that do music and video better.

The iPhone, however, may well be the first iPod to change my mind. Its combination of music/video playback and communicator abilities makes it an enticing prospect. In fact, set it alongside some of the smartphones from Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson and Apple's iPhone seems streets ahead.

Of course, us Europeans won't see an iPhone until just before Christmas. But, does the fact that the device is a quad-band GSM phone mean that we could buy it from the US in June? Similarly, while Apple has jumped into bed with Cingular, will the iPhone be sold unlocked from the Apple store so you can use it with whatever provider you're signed up to?

And can you use Skype on it?

Yes, so the iPhone doesn't have any 3G talents, but does this really matter? Some of the whizzier bits of the keynote demo (browsing Google Maps, for example) will obviously only be possible with a good Wi-Fi connection. But having no 3G might make the iPhone cheaper to run. Wi-Fi connections are, after all, becoming increasingly widespread in towns and cities, while future WiMAX projects could give us urban wireless broadband.

What gives the iPhone announcement even greater impact is the lack of truly big news at this year's CES. There have been some key announcements and products - Sharp's 108-inch LCD TV, Microsoft's IPTV inititiative on the Xbox 360, LG's dual-format HD player and Hitachi's Terabyte HDD. But there's nothing that has turned the collective heads of the international press like the iPhone has done.

To be fair, most of the large-scale product launches happened last year - 1080p televisions, HD DVD and Blu-ray, the PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii, etc. This year's CES evolves those technologies and products. Quite simply there's more of them. The TVs are bigger, the phones and MP3 players are smaller. The rhetoric and marketing fluff is pretty much the same.

It's ironic that the biggest news of CES is about a product that's not at the show and an exhibitor that chooses to ignore it. For Apple, it's surely mission accomplished. All it needs to do now is put on a Windows Vista spoiler event. January 29th looks like a good day for it. I'll expect the invite in my mailbox.