At the end of a day in which the mobileYouth Workout in Piccadilly, London, only danced around the key issues (the specifics of ”youth” mobile consumption were nullified by a number of savvy panelists of university age whose perspectives were common to customers of more age groups than the merely youthful), the final panel eventually paid lip service to the topic du jour, the only one in town.

It fell to one student on stage to highlight to the audience of industry folk - the iPhone, out today, is a handset aimed at the music-, movie-loving “youths” who were the subject of this day-long session, but the pricepoint set by O2 (minimum £35 monthly and £269 for the device) may be too prohibitively expensive to reach that very market.

O2 may have gone some way toward flat-rate data pricing, but £35, £45 and £55 monthly is way out of the reach of many hard-up students, the chap warned. That’s against $60 per month (£30) and $399 (£200) for the handset on America’s ATT. With two hours to go before the die-hards queuing on the streets of London are let in to buy their iPhone, how many of them will really have the petty cash to stump up?