Critics are already getting their teeth into the new Ipod phone (see here and here). It appears to offer nothing but Itunes connectivity and the Ipod branding to set it apart from other singing phones coming onto the market and has a sight less storage ... a 512MB Transflash card, the highest capacity yet available in that format.

Also, so far as I could make out, the Motorola-built Rokr phone does not support A2DP Bluetooth stereo so that you cannot use it properly without wires hanging from your ears. Hardly state of the art. But the talk at the London launch, with its live telecast from San Francisco, was the matter of Apple chief executive Steve Jobs's trousers.

You have to see Jobs in action to understand what a consummate salesman he is. He gives every impression of sincerely believing that everyone is as passionate about Apple and its interests as he is - and he is very passionate indeed. He presents sales figures as if he is giving everyone a pay rise and knows that they will be delighted at the news.

And the astonishing thing is, they are delighted. Twenty-one million Ipods sold! How the audience at San Franciso's Moscone Center clapped and cheered and hooted! You expect this sort of thing from Americans, who appear to have bred out the British cynicism gene, but there were chilling signs of a parallel enthusiasm in London. Are we going soft? 

Jobs surpassed himself when he got to the new Ipod Nano. This really is a beautiful design, but so are a lot of other products. Jobs treated it like it was a long-lost Michelangelo. He stroked it reverentially. He held it to the sky like an offering to the gods. And finally, on cue as it turned out, he posed it against the pocket of his trousers.

There had seemed something slightly incongruous about these from the start. Jobs had adopted his usual style of carefully-groomed casual: the designer stubble, the hair cleverly architected to disguise his bald patch, the open-necked shirt. But the trousers, or rather jeans, were heavier than you might expect on a man dressing for the late San Francisco summer.

The cameras zoomed in on his pocket. Everyone uses the big jeans pocket, Jobs said, but what about the small one tucked in above it? What is the point of it? Have you ever know anything small enough to fit in it? Well, Jobs said, the Ipod Nano will. And he showed it doing so.

Now, as Jobs had said, those tiny sub-pockets generally have hardly enough room for a bus ticket.  The Ipod Nano measures 3.5in by 1.6in by 0.27in. So how did it get in? Did it shrink? Did Apple sew in a bigger pocket? The consensus in London was that Jobs had scoured America for the right class of sub-pocket, and  found it in a pair of heavy-duties designed for the kind of man who carries spanners in his jeans.

At least Jobs did not do his routine of proclaiming every technological feature as if Apple had invented it. He did compare the size of the new Ipod with rival music players, including one from Creative. And the latest Creative just happens to be called the Zen Nano Plus (see below). Coincidence, or what?