Apple News

As most of you know, the Apple Special Event was held on Tuesday the 12th of this month (September). Steve Jobs did a great job again at presenting Apple's new products and some of them were rather nice to see.

Read the full post for more info!

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iPod 5.5G

The new iPod is essentially the same as the older 5G models, but with a few tweaks to make it quite a bit better. The best feature in my oppinion is that the screen has become brighter (and we all know we like brighter screens). At an astonishing 60% more brightness your Desperate Housewifes episodes just look that much better. Doesn't that drain more battery life you ask? No! At up to six-and-a-half hours, the 80GB (which is also the new size - it replaced the 60GB version) iPod has a lot of potential to become a 'real' portable media player. A new firmware update also came along with iTunes 7 (more about that bellow) which allows you to 'fast scroll' through your library and a search mode which lets you find anything quickly and effectively. For all those who like to listen to songs which were meant to use gapless playback, the iPod has full support of it now. A big surprise was that Apple now offer games and movies for download over the iTunes music store (again, more about that in the iTunes section).

So: new features, georgous colour display, movies and games (more about that in iTunes 7 section), better battery life, search and a new size (80GB). How much? At the price of 249$ for the 30GB and 349$ for the 80GB, I suggest everyone to get themselves the 80GB. It's just cheap for its vallue!


iPod Nano 2G

The iPod Nano has been 'completely remastered' they say, which is true, but it still reminds much of the iPod mini. But forget that, the fact is that is just blows your mind away. Now with sizes up to 8GB, this piece of hardware is just amazingly small. With the introduction of beautiful colours (5 to be exact), the iPod Nano has something for every personality. The features list doesn't a lot of new add-ons, but as with the iPod 5.5G there is now a search and a 'fast scroll' type of thing. Your usual features such as music, podcasts, audiobooks, photos and some handy extras are of course not taken away from you, but it would have been nice to see some enw improvemtns. The best new feature is the battery life; 24 hours of non stop listening to music is just great!

Lets recap: fabulous redisgn (although it has been used before technically), fun colours, 3 sizes (2GB, 4GB and 8GB) and some new features make this the trend of 2007. Priced at 149$, 199$ and 249$ respectively they are a good deal if you are not planning on having more then around 2,000 songs (for the 8GB version) in your pocket. If you want movies and games (and extra storage) then go with the iPod 5.5G...


iPod Shuffle 2G











The new iPod Shuffle is the perfect friend for any person planning on just having a couple of songs in your pocket. This thing is amazing! Clip it where ever you want, your belt, pants or jacket and always have full access to the main function buttons. The coolest thing is to let iTunes make a playlist fitting exactly 1GB of music and synchronising it automatically, playing you your songs in shuffle mode while you're on the go. Or, just use it to play those daily podcasts. The options are endless. The dock connector is bundled into the package and for a very good price of 79$ not a person in this world should complain.


iTunes 7


















iTunes 7 has got a couple of wonderful upgrades, my favourite being the new views. As you can see above (in the middle), the new view lets you look through your albums, as though you were flipping through your music collection. But what good is this if you don't have album art? iTunes 7 now lets you download their album art as long as you have a valid iTunes music store account. This is a great feature but it seems it doesn't always work due to it not recognising the album. Another new user interface feature is the more organised source list, which now is catogarised into section such as Library, Store, Devices, etc.

Games are now available for 4.99$ which can be downloaded and put straight onto your 5G and 5.5G iPod, giving you fun times while you're on the bus, train, etc. Personally, I find that this is great for anyone who really wants something fun like Vortex and Zuma. But at nearly 5$ I'm not going to buy a lot of them since games like Tetris just play much better on my phone (or DS?!).

The other main feature is support for movie downloads. Resolutions of 640x480 are a good enough resolution to watch on the TV and perfect for the iPod. Even more TV shows are added and the new movies are now also available at the new (higher) resolution.

Some other fun features include a download manager, an iPod summery page (with built in iPod updater), multiple libraries, gapless playback, library back up and parental controll.

Honestly though, I still don't see myself buying much (if not nothing besides a game or two) since the price of 0.99$ for songs, 1.99$ for TV shows and 12.99$ for pre-ordered and first week movie downloads are still way too expensive. An average season of a TV show features around 24 episodes. So, 24x2$ = 48$ for a season of iTunes! Way too much I think. As for movies, I prefer to just rent something, watch it once and then just return it since I don't have time to watch my whole movie collection over and over again.

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Apple did do a great job once more and I'm really impressed by all the updates and new products. What does everyone think? Post your thoughts up in the comments section!


All images belong to Apple.com

Related links:
iPod + iTunes Home
iTunes Store
Apple Store