The big event of this year’s CES came from far away at the church of the faithful… the day after Gates’s mediocre keynote in Vegas, Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld and seized conrol of the media, the market and the over 100,000 milling through the Convention Center. While Gates lolled on about RFID tags on flour bags Apple revealed an integrated phone/iPod/email/net device, and a business model with all of the upside of an MVNO and none of the down. Carrier Cingular will cede branding to Apple and provide coverage via their Edge network. Questions about action by Cisco, who may own the iPhone name, persist.
