I think every Mac nerd in the world just experienced some form of out-of-body nirvana-like experience.

Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote (which isn’t even finished) has just confirmed that Apple are releasing a mobile phone, it will indeed be called iPhone, and it is quite literally years ahead of what other phone manufacturers are putting out.

So awesome is iPhone that its announcement will overshadow the even bigger news from MacWorld — the Apple TV set-top box, which is equally game-changing, and Apple’s new partnerships with both Google and Yahoo, which IMHO will mark a big shift in the computing industry.

But back to the phone: it’s tiny! It has 8Gb of storage for music and movies! The reports say it runs OS X! (though it appears to be a mobile version thereof.)

And it has a multi-contact screen, so you can move or zoom or rotate things by touching them!

I was going to resist, but the nerd in me just has to post about this.

Steve Job’s big “Showtime” media event has just finished, and aside from some major (but hardly earth-shattering) software upgrades to iTunes and the iPod, he announced two very significant new bits of hardware. If there was any doubt that Apple were going after Sony’s turf and transforming into a consumer electronics company, it is put to rest as of right now.

Announcement one is the ridiculously tiny, and very aggressively priced, new iPod shuffle. Expect to see buses and trains near you absolutely littered with these things in a month or two.

Number two: the “iTV” is so new it lacks a real name, but it’s basically a device that plugs into your TV and runs an upgraded version of Front Row. In other words, it’s an Apple media centre.

It’s due for release early next year, looks like a Mac Mini, and has Ethernet, HDMI, and wireless. The networked home-theatre PC world has so far solely been the preserve of geeks with homebrew setups; for Apple to move into this space is a very big deal.

If it takes off, I dare say this thing is going to be big, like iPod big. And even if it doesn’t, Steve has now played enough of his hand that we know his new plan for world domination, summarised nicely in this slide from the talk.