Oh wow! Ok, you may’ve noticed a sudden upsurge in activity, posts, etc. but I’m shut up in my house with flu (possibly of the swine variety, possibly not) so have literally nothing better to do, have been memorising how to translate binary into decimals and vice versa.

Furthermore, unbeknownst to me (ironically given that I was previously going on about how many tech events there are in the US) an Apple event took place this evening, though by their time standards twas this morning, in which Steve Jobs made his triumphant return to the stage as ringmaster of the Apple announcements. This one was mostly about the music side of the Apple, in which they’ve announced the 5th generation iPod which records video, attempting to compete with the Flip video camera range, slipping a high quality camera and microphone (supposedly, spec remains something of a mystery) into the thin casing with, allegedly, no additional bulk to the device, still allowing for the pointless accelerometer to function therein.

Assuming Apple give these things a decent camera, microphone and can do it all without a dramatic effect on the battery life, then this is a good, and logical, step for Apple. Personally, I see little point for it given that practically everyone who crawls about the western world, with the exception of Richard Briers, carry a video recording device of some description in their pockets. But to be fair, there has been a sizeable and growing market for the Flip cameras (so called because of the switch that flips out the USB port to connect directly to the computer) because of people wanting a higher quality cameras than most companies put on regular phones, not including the phones specifically engineered to be, primarily, a camera. So perhaps Steve Jobs can see a genuine market to throw his bald-spot covering hat into. Nevertheless, you can’t deny the amount of people who own iPods, and they will (me included) be thinking about buying a new one, so once they do and can now only get their hands on the ones with the cameras, Apple will be able to disguise MP3 player sales as video camera sales and claim strong competition against Pure Digital, who develop the Flip cameras. I gather, therefore, that Apple couldn’t justify to themselves developing a whole new device, so intend to push out more tech piggybacking on the on-going success of their old stuff.

By no means is this the only thing to be added to the new iPod Nano, oh crumbs no! The microphone will, as you’d expect, allow built-in functionality at voice recording, as well as a built-in FM radio. Both of which are functions that have up until now been handled solely by third-party developers, which could spell bad news for them, but I suppose that’s what comes from designing add-ons and gadgetry just for one brand of device, they nick your ideas and you can do nothing, it’s their product.

Also announced at the keynote speech was a new version of iTunes, nothing life changing but advanced playlist sharing where you can copy songs onto other computers in your house if you so choose blah blah blah. LP which basically means when you buy an album you get all the little extras, like covers, lyrics and images that you would get with a physical CD or, where the concept originated from, and old LP. Phil Schiller apparentely took a while talking about how fantastic the iPod touch is and how fast it’s gaining market share, he also compared the iPod touch to a dell netbook and saying how it doesn’t fit in your pocket like the Touch does. While I’ll concede that fact is true, who wants to tell me all the things that IPod touches can’t do that laptops can? A long talk about gaming on the iPod Touch.

New devices: New iPod Touch costing £149 for 8GB, £229 for 32GB and £299 (what!) for 64GB. New Nano is £115 for 8GB and £135 for 16GB.

So basically, if I buy a new iPod soon and end up with a camera stuck to the back of it then I can live with that. I’ll never use it but it may come in handy one day. I’m excited about the radio but simply because I enjoy listening to radio, but the prices of the Nano have gone up a bit and there isn’t a massive difference between the 8GB Nano and Touch, so it may be worth me jumping off the Nano bandwagon and getting built-in Wifi and apps for an extra £45. Though I’m going to be a student properly next year so perhaps not.

Predictions for next year’s iPods, probably one with a built-in arm that’ll hold your penis while you piss all your money away.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.