The Apple conference: After weeks of rumours what actually happened?

Jobs returned to work at the end of June after taking a six-month break to recover from a liver transplant.

After a long summer of speculation about the new products on show, in the end the new developments took second billing to Jobs' appearance.

"I'm vertical and I'm back," joked Jobs at the press event in San Francisco.

Jobs, who is notoriously private, then surprised everyone by talking briefly about the operation he received at a hospital in Tennessee.

Jobs said: "As some of you may know, about five months ago I had a liver transplant.

"So I have the liver of a mid-20's person who died in a car crash and was generous enough to donate their organs. I wouldn't be here without such generosity."

The only real product news was regarding a boost for the iPod Nano, which now boasts a video camera and other add-ons.

The new Nano features a built-in video camera, FM tuner and voice recorder, with prices ranging from $149-$179 (£92-£110).

Jobs called the Nano "the most popular music player in the world" with over 100m sold to date.

The company revealed that as a whole, it has sold more than 220m iPods and now commands 73.8% of the market compared to Microsoft's 1.1%.

Apple also lowered the prices of existing iPods and introduced a new 32GB and 64GB iPod Touch that promises to run faster than previous models.

Jobs then turned his attention to the revamped iTunes programme, which now includes app management, home sharing and the ability to buy lyrics, memorabilia and liner notes through an iTunes LP music feature.

Jobs boasted that iTunes is now the world's number one music retailer with 100 million registered users.

As the conference took place, Twitter went down after Jobs mentioned the micro-blogging service during his San Francisco keynote speech.

Users were met with blank pages alerting them to a "HTTP Server Error 503" when they tried to log on.

The problem was fixed after around 15 minutes, although Twitter users had endured problems throughout Wednesday with their @ messages pages failing to refresh.

The outage occurred shortly after Jobs took to the stage to deliver the firm's traditional September address in person, but it is not known if this precipitated the outage.

It is not the first time that Apple's obsessive fans have caused a Twitter meltdown -- the service also crashed during the firm's last two January addresses.

Picture credit: Matthew Yohe