Firstly my thanks to Thomas Ricker, and Engadget for their live-blog of the event, which I followed this morning. Really good, as ever.

Well, as expected, we saw the announcement of the UK iPhone, running on the O2 network. My prediction of them launching immediately was (sadly) off, and they will be available from November 9th. This begs the question what the curtains, and the store closure until 4pm, is about. I am off to Regents Street this afternoon with some friends anyway, so we will see what (if anything!) is different.

The UK iPhone is the same as the current US model, and so we did not a see any form of hardware upgrade. Steve hinted that by this time next year we will have a 3G iPhone, in saying that they expect the battery life issues to be resolved by then. It is therefore running EDGE, which is bad news frankly. The EDGE coverage on O2 in the UK is shocking – indeed the demo model that Journalists saw this morning wasn’t even detecting EDGE in the Apple Store Regents Street, in Central London! While EDGE may be the major coverage service in the US, here and in much of the rest of Europe 3G is the way the networks have gone. It is a shame that this hasn’t been taken into account, as it will mean that the iPhone will probably get bad press from day one when it goes on sale officially here, with the features like Internet Browsing and Song Download needing WiFi connection to be remotely useful. Note that O2 has said that they have partnered with ‘Cloud’ to provide free WiFi in over 7,000 locations. Whether this makes up for it I am not sure…

While the announcement was good, I can’t say that I was wowed by any of the announcements related to Apple. Indeed one of the only ‘at last!’ moments was O2′s announcement that as of October 1st they will make all of their contract plans unlimited data.

Regardless this was a great morning, and I am hoping that by the time I get there at 4pm today, they will have put out the iPod touchs in the store for general consumption. I get to play with a multi-touch display at last!