iPhone overload - and it's not even launched yet

If I was looking to hire a PR team, there’d only be one place to look right now in my opinion. You’ve got to take your hats off to the PR bods at Apple – it seems at the moment not a day goes past without a plethora of Apple and iPhone-related stories hitting both the online and offline press.

Here at SMS Text News, we like news stories about mobile. We find them, blog them, analyse them, and occasionally do a bit of complaining. In the early days of the iPhone hype, we’d jump on anything about the elusive device and blog it. However, if we did that in the past few weeks, not only would you think you were reading an Apple PR site, we’d probably have to hire a whole team of bloggers just to cover every story.

Take this example. A quick scoot around Google News produces 7,997 articles on the iPhone from the last 24 hours – and it’s not all the same story. Reg Hardware is reporting a US Analyst alleges it’s already hitting Palm device sales. The Inquirer says four different networks are tipped for the European exclusive rights. The Boston Globe says Apple investors may have set their hopes too high, after the companys market value passed $100billion in May on the back of iPhone fever. iTWire are quoting a Gartner analyst, who reckons the handset will be a ‘game changer’.  And finally, from my random selection, Scientific American are running a story that German manufacturer Balda are quite chuffed that Apple are busy ordering a huge amount more touch screens from the company.

There’s coverage good and bad in there. Whatever your thoughts on the old saying ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’, I think it’s easy to agree that Apple are getting a huge chunk of coverage out there at the moment.

Has the iPhone’s moment been and gone, even before it’s launched? Whether the press frenzy will die down after this Friday’s US launch remains to be seen.