Here's hoping for an iPod that is also a space heater... or the ability to download gumball recipees from the iTunes music store... or perhaps DRM that's so great you can only listen to a song once and then you hard drive automatically reformats itself.
For more details, either stay tuned to this site, or go somewhere else.
And, now, here are those crazy details:
New iPods... nothing major here, now you can play games on your iPod not even worth playing on your cell phone. It has a new brighter screen, which is alright, but it's the same size. The battery life, however, has been expanded to last 20 hours, which sounds pretty excellent.
Oh yeah, they come with new headphones now. Every headphone that has ever come with any portable player has sucked major applesauce, and I'm sure this is no different.
Best part is though that they've lowered the price, it's now $249 for the 30gb, and $349 for the 80gb.
Somehow apple has managed to decrease the size of the nanos even more while doubling the storage capacity. They now sport different colours as well. Pretty cool looking.
iTunes 7 is actually what may be what I'm most excited about out of all this. Besides looking slightly different there are a couple of new features that makes this product worth the upgrade.
The feature you'll hear most about on the news will be the Disney movies now for sale. Whatever. If someone is dumb enough to pay $15 for a movie to watch on a two inch iPod screen or their computer monitor then more power to Apple.
The features most worth noting are not even listed in the "What's new" section of the help file. And, because of this, all of the new little tweaks still have not been found.
iTunes now keeps track of how many times you skip a song. This data can be used to make smart playlists so you can exclude the songs you skip most. Pretty clever.
Every time you import music now, iTunes will search for and add the album art for the songs. I've had mixed success with this, but it's still a nice feature which hopefully will improve in the future.
For some reason in past versions of iTunes the visualizer would not display in your full resolution in full screen (unless, of course, you have a sucky resolution) in the windows version. Now, however, it does and looks very perty.
iTunes also has a few new ways of looking at your music involving your album art. It looks nice, but is pretty useless.
If more fun features are found, I'll add 'em.
Now, to look forward to the Wii announcement on Thursday...
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9:38:00 AM
The world's oldest iPod has died at the age of 2. It's owner, George Flippant, 12 of Newark, New Jersey, hobbies include fishing and fragging, his favorite Backstreet boy is the one with the hair, was deeply saddened by the unfortunate turn of events.
The iPod more than outlived it's life expectancy of 366 days (1 day longer than the included warranty) by a full year. Many marveled at the ancient technology of the iPod with it's old school tech wheel and all.
"The wheel in the click wheel actually turned instead of staying stationary. It's so 2002," Flippant's 8 year old neighbor Alexander Beef told us when we were able to distract him from his new triple screen GameBoy.
The elder iPod's life ended abruptly when it was dropped on Flippant's kitchen floor.
"It all happened so fast," Flippant told us, telling us the events of the iPod's demise, "One minute I was dancing to the new Eminem song with the iPod in my hand. I was pretending to be one of those silhouette people like in the commercials. Then the next minute the iPod has flown out of my hand and is crashing into a million pieces after hitting the floor."
Most iPods die of bad batteries, hard drive failure, or depression of a crappy music library. Not everyone believes Flippant's story.
"He just broke it cause he wanted a new one for christmas," George Flippant's sister Georgia told us, "He's always doing stuff like that. He always get's it too. Like that time he broke his arm and Mom took him out of school for two days. He was so faking it."
The police will not say if they're willing to rule out foul play yet.
"What the hell do I care what happened to some kid's walkman," Tony Putz, chief of police, told us.
Meanwhile George does indeed plan to ask for another iPod this christmas.
"They're so cool. They're just like old iPods but they can display photos! And they're only $600!"
echnology is always improving. And what better technology out there right now then the mp3 player. Of course there's all those
medical type equipments and such too, but this story isn't about that.
Rio used to have the overall market share of MP3 players, way back in the golden age
of 1999. But then other companies started competing, and that can never can be good
for business, just look at Jack in the Box. Then Apple made an mp3 player that
didn't suck, and that was the end of that... but, unfortunately, not the end of this
story.
Rio is back on the market with an MP3 player so small it's sure to turn heads, at
least it would if it were viewable. The new Rio MP-87658.0g is not only so small it can
fit inside a match book holder, if such a thing exists, it also is capable of holding
45,095,9832,125.9 songs of CD quality (this is if each song is only 90 seconds long
and encoded at a bit rate of 18kps, you may say that's not CD Quality, but that's your
opinion. I personally can't tell the difference between CDs and a mp3 of this
quality).
A Rio spokesperson told us it also might have games you can play on it. They're not
sure yet, even though the MP3 has an LCD screen, it's too small for anyone too see if
games are actually available on it.
This MP3 player sounds all fine and dandy, and I highly recommend it. The only
drawback so far is that it may be a little fragile. In fact, about two thirds of all
players will break if you push the buttons on the front a little too hard. The
player is not compatible with AAC or WMA, so if your one of those losers who actually
pay for songs you download you are out of luck. Also the player is too small to use
headphones with, an adapter is planned, but has not yet been released. Oh, and one
last thing, I think Rio went of business years ago.
