Apple held its media event, "Let's Rock" on 9th September in San Francisco. I was very much excited about it and had reminders set up to remind me (just in a rare event if forgot) about it. Now since I can't actually go and see the proceedings, I experienced it vicariously via live blogs. It was nice to see the God take up the stage for the ever famous Keynote. (I know Apple events have Steve Jobs addressing the keynote, but the stories of his ill health made us - the Macboys, worried if there'll be a Stevenote this time or not).
It started with a screen saying "Talks of my death have been greatly exaggerated" and Steve Jobs informing the world that he's fine now. He later revealed some facts and figures about the iTunes Music Store and then came what was most awaited. The refreshed iPod lineup and iTunes 8. The rumormongers had been very much correct about new iPod Nano design and the new features bundled in iTunes 8.
The iPod Nano received a feature additions and cosmetic changes. Shedding the "chubby" form factor, the new version is longish, some what like the 2G iPod Nano's. It has an accelerometer that brings in a slew of new features. For one, it allows you to shake-to-shuffle - you can shuffle your songs if you give the Nano a slight shake. It also brings in automatic screen rotation - the screen's orientation changes depending on how you hold the Nano. The screen is bigger than the previous generation iPod Nano's. There are also changes to the UI in the underlying software. The most notable change is the range of new colors in which the Nano will be available. Apple is marketing it very appropriately as Nano-Chromatic.
In short - sweet. I wish to buy one of those soon. I like the silver, gray and red colors (I shortened the list, I wrote all the available colors earlier :) ).
The iPod Shuffle, without an explicit mention, also got updated to new brighter colors. Though the rumored 4GB bump is still a rumor and didn't make it to the final product.
With the redesigned iPod Touch, Apple made an entry into the gaming market. The new iPod Touch, with firmware 2.1 was launched as a gaming device. It sports very crisp and delicious graphics. A Nike+ receiver has been built in to this device. I hope to see a good wide range of games for this platform.
Also launched were new accessories for the iPods. Of them, the most notable was the new dual-driver in-ear headphones.
Coming to iTunes 8, the latest major update to Apple's flagship jukebox software. iTunes 8 has a new offering called the Genius. This is one pretty feature that was missing from iTunes. It recommends you music that goes along well with other songs in your library. It requires an iTunes Store account to work. It stores your listening data on Apple's servers and as other users add their listening profiles, the Genius gets smarter giving you better recommendations. You select a song, click the Genius button and in the sidebar you get your recommendations based on that song. The Genius sidebar is a drawer that you can open and close to save screen real estate. The Genius "is" smart and does offer you proper recommendations most of the times.
Besides, there is one new way in which you can browse your library. I personally do not find it preferable over the Cover Flow view, but it can be useful at times. It shows your media in a Grid view. They items are grouped in this view, the default grouping criteria being the album. Songs from one album are placed in one group with the album art of that album showing up. Hovering the mouse over that tile shows up the option to play that album. The grouping criterion can be changed to Album, Artist, Genre and Composers. This view makes the listening experience similar to listening to an audio CD on a player.
There were new additions to the iTunes Music Store. The store now has HD TV shows. It would be interesting to see Heroes, Lost and such in HD.
With that, allow me to move on to the next part of this series of "short" posts. :)
[This post is part 2 of a multipart post, read part one, three and four by clicking on the links]
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment