The demo gods who oversee the first showing off of all products have frowned upon Steve Jobs. Here was Steve showing off his new shiny gizmo as if it would bring the Arabs and the Jews together and suddenly it did not work.

Steve was mid way through his hundredth standing ovation, when suddenly the iPhone 4G broke. He was attempting to show the difference in how Web site text was displayed between the new retina display feature on the iPhone 4 versus the iPhone 3GS. He claimed that the conference hall Wi-Fi was not cooperating, although we would have thought that was something that should have been a doddle to fix in advance. Only one of the phone's browser windows was loading. The other was blank except for the half-filled blue progress bar along the top.

Jobs fiddled with the phone before saying: "Well geez. I guess I can't show you that much today," he said reluctantly. "I can show you some pictures." So he moved on to that. He tried to come back to the demo of the phone's browser, but no luck.

"I'm sorry guys, I don't know what's going on," he said to the crowd of developers and media. "Got any suggestions?" he asked. Someone from the back helpfully shouted, "Verizon!" Though the crowd laughed. Jobs sheepishly said that “we're actually on Wi-Fi here”.

About 20 minutes later, Jobs said he'd figured out that there were more than 570 Wi-Fi connections in the room that were disrupting his demo.

"So you guys have a choice: Either turn off your Wi-Fi (devices) or I give up. Would you like to see the demos?" he asked the crowd. "Then all you bloggers need to turn off your notebooks. Go ahead, just shut the lids. I'll wait," he said. Much to the shame of the US media, some actually switched off and stopped reporting because Steve told them too. Even if they were not using a wi-fi connection.

Our guess is that next time Jobs engineers an event like this, people will not be allowed to bring wi-fi gear into the hall.