‘Time magazine called it the phone that has changed phones forever’, said Apple’s marketing vice-president Phil Schiller. ‘Today we are introducing iPhone 5’.

With these words, the technology giant – the most profitable in the world – confirmed that today is about the iPhone 5, as the company holds a lavish launch in San Francisco, with a simultaneous launch in London.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, in San Francisco, took to the stage to announce: ‘We’ve got some really cool stuff to show you, it’s an extraordinary time at Apple.’

Then he started giving specifics, announcing that the new handset has a larger 4-inch display, is just 7.6mm thick, and is made entirely of glass and aluminium – the ‘most challenging design our team has ever taken on’.

Apple confirmed the phone has a four-inch display, – 1136×640 – which is the same width as previous models but taller.

It uses a new display which is 30 per cent thinner that previous handsets.

Schilling, vice president of marketing, said: ‘It is designed to fit in the hand, and all of our software is being updated to take advantage of this display.’

The firm also added 4G to the handset, allowing it to run on new superfast networks.

The firm is working with AT&T, Verizon and Sprint in the US and EE in the UK, as well as operators around the world.

The firm boasted that the new handset has eight hours of 3G talk time, and a 225 hour standby time.

It also has an eight megapixel camera with a 3264×2448 sensor, has improved performance in low light, and a lens made from sapphire crystal.

Lastly, Apple, under Steve Jobs, was famed for it’s ‘…And one last thing…’, where Jobs would unveil an unexpected feature or product almost as an aside.

Perhaps this will happen tonight, either with – as rumoured – a sneak-peek at the iPad Mini, which is believed to be a shrunken iPad 2-like device.

Or perhaps it will be an additional feature to the iPhone 5, such as wireless charging or the ability to use the phone as a debit card at the tills.

The battle for domination of the mobile market has become increasingly heated recently with Apple’s competitors taking it on with a series of new products.

The company has taken a lot of heat from the Samsung Galaxy range, which have, over the last two years, received rave review and become some of the biggest selling smartphones in history.

This led to a billion-dollar patent suit, where Apple successfully claimed that Samsung had copied the iPhone’s iconic look.

Nokia and Microsoft have also recently joined forces to launch two new phones which will run on the Windows operating system.

The Nokia Lumia 920 and Nokia Lumia 820 are the Finnish company’s attempt to claw back lost ground since it lost its position as the world’s biggest phonemaker to Samsung.

Online retailer Amazon recently unveiled new models of its Kindle Fire tablets, which were previously not for sale in the UK, and are seen as rivals to Apple’s best-selling iPad.

It is around a year since Apple unveiled the iPhone 4S complete with voice recognition software and an A5 chip allowing it to use much faster graphics for gameplay and to download data twice as fast.

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