"Let's Rock": The iPod event

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

That is the first thing Steve Jobs covered in his awesome keynote today. That, and that iTunes has quite the customer base, and so they're pleased to announce the addition of HD television episodes which start at 2.99 dollars, and they can now be watched directly on your computer. Speaking of which, NBC is announcing a return, so yes, you can purchase Heroes on hi-def legally again.

iTunes 8
"We have been receiving a lot of requests for HD TV shows, Accessibility, New Browsing and Genius. Let's look at the last two."

A new space-efficient way to browse is to now be able to scroll through album covers solely. It's not Cover Flow, but it's more of a tool that let's you see little tiles of an album of a particular artist. This also applies for movies, TV shows, etc.

And, if you want to look at your music by genre or composers, you can sift through a genre by putting your mouse over the genre's name and scroll up or down to see artists. Like in iPhoto.

And then there's Genius which helps pair various tunes together that it thinks sound nice together. You can do that in only one click. Plus, you can even summon a sidebar that gives suggestions that link to the iTunes Store that it thinks will go great together with your existing tunes. You can repeatedly refresh it as well. So if you like Pandora, you may want to give Genius a shot.

Plus, Genius benefits from better results if even more people use it. So, it's basically something other humans upgrade by just clicking, and I have a feeling that I will definitely be using this. It will even update once a week!

It's now available for free.

iPod
Sales figures bla, bla, bla... 160 million units sold, fine... and finally!

iPod Classic
Now the 80GB is off, gone forever, and 120GB remains at the price of the 80GB ($249 or 11500 pesos), and it's as thin. Nothing else.

iPod Nano (OMFG)
Gasp, puberty has done something to everyone's favorite Nano!

"We have a new iPod nano for this holiday season and it's really really beautiful."

INDEED. -drool-

It's the thinnest iPod ever made, and the wide 3G design is scrapped for the original tall design, only with a huge screen. It comes with more colors than ever, and it's sure to be a big hit. When Steve Jobs put it out of his pocket, it was just gorgeous and so small!

New features? A new curved aluminum design, it has curved glass for durability, it now even has a new interface design, Genius playlist selection so you can access the iTunes feature in the iPod itself, and an accelerometer! Wow, what would you do with the accelerometer? I wonder...

Like the iPod touch, you can just flip the iPod nano sidewards to activate cover flow or look at a photo on landscape mode and of course for videos like the iPod touch. Song browsing looks more like the love child of the iPod touch's and the iPod classic's navigations, and when you're playing the song, the album art occupies the screen (like the Zune or the iPod touch)! Very nice. And oh, if you push the center button without letting go, you'll see a sub-menu that enables you to see several features such as "Start Genius" so you can build playlists that sound great together on the fly, add it to the "On-The-Go" Playlist, browse the artist and browse the album. Plus, you can just shake the whole thing to activate shuffle, and like in the famous Walkman phones, you will be led to a different track. Just excellent.

Heck, it even has a voice recorder! Hope we can see these (Voice Recorder, Shake Shuffle and Genius, that is) in the touch...

This product is droolworthy... it's desirable. But I'm surprised that they didn't put the same stuff into the Classic. Perhaps the next model's gonna be called Dinosaur and it will be one step behind the nano?

24 hours of audio and 4 hours of video battery life is promised.

But if you hate black, you can get more colors. And this is where the nano-chromatic line stands. Each of them is a gorgeous color and ranges from purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red and magenta. They're shipping in 8GB and 16GB flavors and the former will sell for 150 USD (about 7000 pesos) while 200 USD (10000 pesos approx.) for the latter. Wow, I smell hotcakes already. Now shipping (expect a hands-on in 2 weeks or so).Accessories
There's once again, the armband for fitness buffs, but what if they don't like a song and they want to click next? Do they have to stop their run just to press Next? Hell no! Well, Apple has introduced a new set of earbuds that has this sort of volume control thingy you'd typically find in phones. The plus button is of course, for volume increase, minus for volume decrease, and depending on the number of presses you do on the central button, you could either pause or play, go to the next song or go back to the previous song, and it even has a mic. This is gonna be convenient since you only have to hold your earbuds to do that, but they're not included with the nano nor any of the iPods for free unfortunately. They ship in October for 29 USD.

And for the rich, you can get the earbuds that have a woofer and a tweeter for 79 dollars. Typically, you'd find these in even more expensive earbuds, but now, it's in genuine Apple earbuds. And they're white. See this in October as well.

iPod touch
Steve Jobs calls it "the funnest iPod ever", and that's because it now comes with 2.1 of the iPhone software, so you can get games and apps onto your phone without having to pay extra! Plus, a few requests have been granted, such as the addition of more humane buttons for volume (Woot), and a loudspeaker just like the iPhone. And it has Genius (Woot), E-mail, contacts, international keyboard support, and basically most of what the iPhone has to offer. And it's also in a contoured stainless steel design (plus it's thinner).
Don't fret existing iPod touch owners, because all of this comes with the firmware upgrade! You get Genius, and most of the iPhone's features save for the crappy calling, but for a price: $9.99, if you're upgrading from version 1.x. The iPhone will also be affected by this update as it fixes security leaks and drops calls less (I have yet to see if this is correct). But this is what I like about Apple, there are new features in newer models, but they don't leave past models far behind at all. Watch out for it this Saturday.

Alternatively, you can just go ahead and buy this new one for the significantly (significantly) reduced price of $229 (10,534 pesos approx) for the 8GB model, $299 (approx. 14,000) for the 16GB model and $399 (approx. 20000 pesos with tax) for the 32GB model. Ooooh....

And oh, better battery life of approx. 36 hours for music and 6 hours for video.

Spore Origins
Specifically made for the iPhone, Spore Origins tries to duplicate the PC experience, and it looks stunning!

Spore in action and more games
Just watch the video below.


Don't forget!
The iPod Shuffle once again gets a re-color. Nothing special. Just snubbed like the Classic. Hmm..., it seems that Steve Jobs' favorite son is the one in the middle, eh? (1GB costs 50 dollars or 2300 pesos, and 2GB costs 70 dollars or 3200 pesos)

Ladies and gentlemen, the ads.
I love the ads. They make me unsatisfied with what I have, joke. But seriously, Apple makes the best ads.




Wow, that was a really great conference, and frankly, Jobs should've made the NBC thing a "One More Thing" moment. It was just a shock that he would merely mention it in passing! Well, I hope you had fun reading this as much as I had fun typing this. Good night everyone, and expect a hands-on of the new models, as well as a review of the 2.1 software update for the iPod touch in the coming weeks.