New Apple announcements…

I’m taking a short break from our little Google series to catch you up on the little Apple shindig that happened today. It was a pretty boring deal with no new products and no particularly ground-breaking features. However, there was a bit of intrigue in there.

iTunes 9

• They added iTunes LPs which have lyrics, concert videos, exclusive songs, and photo albums. Oddly enough, they don’t include lossless, uncompressed versions of the song for high fidelity listening. Boring!
• Improved interface, an App manager, and tweaks to the syncing procedure. More “who cares.”
• A Home Library that allows all the computers on your account to automatically import songs from other computers. Basically, if you download a new song on your desktop, next time your laptop is on the same network, it will import that song from your desktop. This feature is great, especially for anal retentive people like me who do everything they can to be sure all their music is the same on all computers.
• Tweet your current listening selection. Meh. Its kind of cool, but I doubt I’d ever use it. I’ve got much more important things to post on Twitter.

iPod Nano

• The Nano got a camera and a microphone. This is pretty nice and it includes a voice-over feature and effects for the camera such as night-vision (the green blurry footage) and 19 or so other effects.
• On the aesthetic front, it got a new paint job that is shiny instead of the matte finish in prior generations.
• FM tuner: Welcome to 1998, Apple. 1998 is approximately when the first mp3 player got its FM tuner. Downside is you need to plug in headphones to get reception. Not a big deal for the most part though.
• Did you know that people that use a pedometer walk approximately 2,000 more steps than those without? Did you know the iPod Nano now has a pedometer? Get your walk on!

iPod Touch

• Upgraded processor in the 32 and 64Gb models. Boring!
• The 8Gb version price is lowered to $199. Boring!

That about covers it aside from some extremely minor updates to the iPod Shuffle and the iPod Classic. If you have any questions, ask away in the comments. Back to the Google series tomorrow with Google Docs!

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