On Tuesday January 10th Apple made its much anticipated move into the mobile phone business, unveiling a new device that’s controlled by touch, plays music, surfs the Internet and runs the Macintosh OS operating system. To stress the company’s move into consumer electronics Steve Jobs then renamed the company to “Apple Inc.” Dropping the word computer from their title. Kind of sad really, like the end of an era.

The new phone is called, not surprisingly, the iPhone, and will have a starting retail price of $499. The phone will “reinvent” the telecommunications sector and “leapfrog” past the current generation of hard-to-use smart phones, Jobs said. Although I must say that I never heard anyone complain about the difficulty of using their phone and reinvent is a term we hear all too frequently. But given the amazing success of many of Apples projects, iTunes and the iPod spring to mind, it is quite possible that electronics retailing might never be the same.

Unlike other smartphones, the iPhone will have no keyboard but will have a touch-sensitive screen from which users will be able to type messages, launch applications, dial phone numbers, and perform similar tasks.

“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he said during his keynote address at the annual Macworld Conference and Expo. “It’s very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. … Apple’s been very fortunate in that it’s introduced a few of these.” The iPhone will be available in June in the U.S. but won’t be available in Europe and Asia until 2008.

Jobs set forth the rather modest goal of selling 10 million phones before the overseas release date. Assuming they meet this goal it will represent only 1% of the total cell phones sold in the United States this year.

Jobs also unveiled a TV set-top box that allows people to send video from their computers to their televisions. With the rise of online video downloads and similar media this device is likely to be a boost for the company. He announced a Feb. 1 ship date for the TV box.

Investor were certainly excited by the new venture, Apple shares climbed more than 6 percent on the announcement.