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
Refusing to admit being outdone in any sort of way, Microsoft Launched it's own Music Store last week. Unfortunately, the ease of use is nonexistent. MSN just doesn't get it.
After purchasing each song you must enter in a serial number and register it (or in their words, "activate it") within 30 days of first play or else the song will cease to function. Also each song will automatically put a shortcut in your taskbar, desktop, and start menu. It will also run in the background when you start your PC and have to be shut off manually in the bottom right corner of your screen.
If it annoys you to have to turn off all your music files every time you go on the computer, don't worry, all the files will crash by themselves if you just wait a couple of minutes. Of course for each file that crashes you will get that annoying error box asking you if you want to send a report to Microsoft about it. Sending the report, of course, will just result in a web page loading up blaming the crash on a third party driver.
Meanwhile Microsoft is warning users to update their music files to latest version or they may be taken over by a hacker. And hackers have a crappy bitchin' taste in music (edited by hacker i-m-so-kewl). It is also advised that you reformat your mp3 player each time you transfer a new song onto it for best results.
Apple, owner of song selling leader iTunes, has said they will stay on top by continuing to offer mediocre products at expensive prices... but that are extremely stylish.
Note: I would love to take credit for creating the above image, but I actually stole it from here.
Labels: apple, bill gates, itunes, mp3, msn music, windows
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