In the end, Steve Jobs wore jeans. For the most important announcement his company would make in many years, Apple’s chief executive - who also donned his trademark black turtleneck - looked remarkably casual. But the global reaction to his new $599 toy has been anything but.

Mainstream news outlets, online journals and bloggers have exploded with praise for the new iPhone, which is out in the US in June and due for European release at the end of the year.

The world over well-known and amateur commentators alike have tapped away at their keyboards in the past 24 hours, poring over the 11.6mm thick device’s specifications, making predictions about Apple’s entry will affect the market, and generally salivating over a piece of kit which, one blogger said, "makes you feel the horniness in your gut".

Engadget, the respected technology blog, led the testimonies: "iPhone, the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it’d been nothing more than a twinkle in Stevie J’s eye: sweet, glorious," it said.

Over at the New York Times, which reported the launch with the rather more modest 'Apple Introduces Innovative Cellphone', David Pogue, the chief technology writer, could barely contain his excitement: "It feels amazing in your hand. Not like an iPod, not like a Treo — but something new. It’s so cool how the screen turns off to save power, thanks to its proximity sensor."

Forbes, the business magazine, captured the sense of impatience among geeks the world over when it said: "Apple CEO Steve Jobs complained that he was so excited the night before, he couldn’t sleep a wink. Then he went and unveiled a phone that’s going to ruin the sleep schedule (and budget) of every $600-phone-craving geek until June."

Time magazine’s reviewers, meanwhile, did not waste any superlatives: "The iPhone could do to the cellphone market what the iPod did to the portable music player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority," one said.

In many ways, however, it has been the blogging community that has best summed up the import of what Mr Jobs had to say: this was an announcement to make the eyes of gadget-lovers gleam.

"My first reaction to it was almost like eveyone’s else ... WOW!" said ‘Dee’, on her Vox blog. "Everyone is drooling over it and some are even having orgasms just looking at it!"

Bocajob, on Bojacob’s den, said: "I’m trading my 500 year-old heirloom for iPhone!" "I may be getting overexcited, but you cannot help admitting that the thing is going to rock the cell-phone world forever. I was refreshing the Engadget page like crazy, reading every inch of text I could lay my eyes on. The thing is friggin SWEET!," he said.

On the blog ‘Bodhi Tree Swaying - Reflections of a Western Buddhist’, Bodhipaksa said: "Many Buddhists seem particularly prone to technolust for some reason, and I’m no exception. I bet even the Dalai Lama’s drooling over this particular gadget."

There was the odd dissenting voice. Wired Magazine, in a post entitled ‘the top 5 worst things about iPhone’ pointed to doubts about the phone’s battery life, its relatively small memory, and the fact that it wasn’t 3G. But a cheerful disclaimer was added, lest the criticism amount to some kind of blasphemy: ‘We love iPhone, we really do!"

Tom Krazit, a writer with CNET, another technology blog, tried to come to terms with the global flood of praise thus: "There’s a Mac subculture akin to Star Trek aficionados or Burning Man attendees. Its devotees can be testy, defensive and intensely devoted to their Apple products. And Jobs, they say, is their hero."

Yesterday, that hero left his fans in no doubt as to where their favourite company was headed, announcing at the end of his speech that Apple would drop the ‘computer’ from its name in a bid to further broaden its appeal: "Today we’ve added to the Mac and the iPod; we’ve added Apple TV, and now iPhone. And the Mac is the only one you think of as a computer. We will now be known as Apple Inc," Mr Jobs said.

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