Sure, the phone is what it is. And Cisco is suing. But what struck me on the day of El Jobso’s announcement was the massive shift away from the traditional tech press as a communications vehicle to the gadget blogs.
The Apple phone was to Engadget and Gizmodo what the explosion of TWA Flight 800 was to MSNBC.com in the mid-90s. The moment when the world abandoned one medium — the so-called mainstream press’s online presence — for blogged news.
Engadget and Gizmodo owned the week between the phone and CES. And I watched as lots of colleagues watched the play-by-play unfold in a blog format — no one was hitting refresh on the homepage of media outlets that ten years ago would have been, reflexively, the go-to source for a new product announcement.