Apple’s announced-this-week iPhone is revolutionary. OK in many ways it is yet another PDA/phone. Yes it has a camera and you can browse the photos you take. Yes it does email and voicemail and SMS. Yes you can play music, and of course, you can browse the web. There’s also stock prices and weather information available through widgets. None of these things are extraordinary-although the integration with Google maps is a little bit extraordinary.

What’s completely wild about the iPhone (and it will be called an iPhone-Cisco, who owned that brand name, sold it to Apple just in time for the announcement) is the interface. You use your fingers as the mouse and the applications present you with touchable areas or, if necessary, a keyboard to touch-type on. The interface also automatically adjusts itself to portrait or landscape view whenever you turn it. This is an impressive design achievement. The mobile phone keyboard just disappeared completely-even the numbers. It’s gone. Forever, probably.

Since Apple has all the patents on this interface, no competitor is going to be able to get anywhere near what the iPhone does for quite a while.

The competition has a little grace. Apple is not shipping a single device until June and the iPhone is not being sold at bargain basement prices either. A four gigabyte model will cost $499 and you’ll pay $599 for an eight gigabyte model. Initially it will go on sale in the US with Cingular being the carrier. Deals with other carriers across the world will naturally follow.

Technically the device provides quad-band access-which means you can use it anywhere in the world and it auto-connects to Wifi points when they are available. It runs Apple’s OS X-so a developer network and new apps for the device will inevitably appear quickly. The device naturally syncs with your Apple PC or laptop in respect of email, music, and other files.

In announcing the device, Steve Jobs claimed that sometimes there are new products that change everything and indicated that this was one of them. Despite the Jobs hype-factor, this is probably true.

Apple has moulded and developed an end-to-end delivery capability for its products, which none of its competitors can currently do. It combines web, computer, software and end-device. It showed how powerful this could be with the iPod, but what it has here has far more potential. The end-node is now a fully functional PDA computer and cell phone with a to-die-for interface, not a souped up memory stick. The only supply-chain partners Apple needs are mobile carriers and they will queue up to be part of the action.

The stock market was quick to react to Apple’s announcement with Apple’s shares gaining 7 percent, but more tellingly, shares of both Palm Inc. and Research in Motion fell more than 5 percent. How are Nokia and Sony Ericsson going to compete with the iPhone? It’s hard to say.

The iPhone sets the cat amongst the pigeons.