Archive for September 9th, 2008

Apple: Let’s Rock

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Apple organized an event today titled ‘Let’s Rock’, that meant ‘Steve-time’…Steve Jobs, a presentation-master in action! I haven’t seen the video yet, I guess it will be released later tonight, but Engadget (among others) was live-blogging the event, bringing you as close as can be (well, almost…I *did* miss Robert Scoble, aka the Scobleizer, who was audio streaming a similar event last year 😉 )

The main announcements from Apple in this event:

  • iTunes8

This version comes with ‘Genius’, a new way to browse through content and make playlists

  • iPod

– a new version iPod Classic 120Gb replacing the 80Gb and 160Gb models

– a new iPod nano with a new, curved, aluminum design, available in 9 different colors, and it now includes a motionsensor enabling rotation of the display for album Cover Flow and a ‘shake to shuffle songs’ mechanism, nice. The newly introduced Genius function can also be used

– Ipod Touch v2 with a slightly modified design (stainless steel casing and even thinner), a built-in speaker, updated UI, and Genius functionality to create playlists

  • Appstore

In the relative short 60 day period that the App Store is open, already 100 milion apps were downloaded! New games were announced, including Need For Speed and Real Soccer 2009…cool! The iPhone/iPod Touch is turning into the best portable device for playing games, eh?

  • iPhone 2.1 software update

This is a big update, and should fix lots of bugs. It should also decrease the number of dropped calls, improve the battery life, avoid crashes with Apps and have a faster backup process while syncing with iTunes. Furthermore the software includes some great new performance enhancements…a free update, available from this Friday. (well, uhh…I guess I have to wait until my iPhone Dev Team friends release a new version of the Pwnage tool 😉 )

All in all Apple had some great announcements today, then again…the BIG one I was hoping for, a new line of MacBooks, did not come through, yet…guess I have to wait a little bit longer.