I know it's a strange way to start a post but the guy is evil incarnate and has the goal of world domination through the use of little white earphones... To those who might not know him (or of him), he's the big boss Apple guy... Yep. He's the brains and financial brawn behind all the marketing hoopla that launched the iPod name to unbelievable heights. And what has Apple done now? They've launched three, yep, count 'em... three new iPod models! Temptation thou is thine name!
While I don't give a hoot about the new Nano (though it is cute with the video option at 320x240), it is still an attractive offer from Cupertino. It won't supercede my current iPod Vid (though a measly 30gb) any time soon but this product isn't aimed at current iPod video users. More likely they targeted this for those who are waffling about getting either a Shuffle or the Vid. This slots right in between the two in terms of price, capacity and capabilities. Yes it does have video but it's sort of useless at that size. You won't be watching the latest season of House on this... It does have Cover Flow (new iPod interface) though and this is a huge improvement over the screen-less shuffle and the older Nano with the generic ipod interface. It retails for $149 and $199 for the 4GB and 8GB models respectively.
The iPod video refresher is... nice. It isn't revolutionary. They lost the iPod classic white color scheme (which is a + or - depending on your tastes), changed the material to anodized aluminum (which is very good since you'll no longer want to keep the thing in a case all the time to prevent your silk boxers from scratching the extremely fragile surface a'la the previous gen iPod videos), added the Cover Flow feature and... here's the kicker for you Music whores... it goes up to 160GB! That's around 40,000 songs or 200 hours of video! No one I know has that many songs. If ever I get this thing then it'll probably split the storage into 20-30GB songs, 50-80GB video and the rest as a portable hard drive for pictures and etc... It's cheaper than the older gen too! The 80GB goes for $249 and the 160GB for $349.
Here's what's exciting for me though. There were a lot of hints for this product the past few months and even days after the original iPhone launch, rumors were already circulating about this product's existence. Experts have said that many would abandon the iPhone for this since most just want the iPhone for the interface and the looks. Many people scoffed and said Apple wouldn't kill it's iPhone sales by releasing a competitive product that might eat into it's numbers, but here it is!
They call it the iPod touch. It's a baby iPhone essentially, but without the phone. From a press release:
"The iPod touch will use the same interface as the current iPhone and will have battery life sufficient for 22 hours of audio playback and five hours of video playback, according to Jobs. The iPod touch will come in two sizes—8GB for $299 (roughly PhP 15,000) and 16GB for $399 (rougly PhP 18,000)and will ship later this month."
Using the same screen, larger storage and smaller/thinner form factor as the iPhone and with WiFi (and apparently Bluetooth but it wasn't announced) capabilities, you'd think that this baby would be a helluvalot more expensive but they actually cut the price by about 1/3 from the iPhone (it used to sell at $499 for the 4GB iPhone and $599 for the 8GB). The original is being transitioned into la-la land apparently since the 4GB has been phased out and the 8GB model just got a $200 price drop. That might indicate a newer model on the horizon but you never know with old Steve-o... I wish they'd make this with SanDisk's new 32GB SSD superdrives as an option. 16GB just isn't enough to load up all the videos you'd want to stuff in this thing. Curiously though, they called this the 'Touch' which is a name already associated with HTC's Touch smart phone launched almost a year ago. So right now I'm torn between getting an HTC Touch which is already available or waiting for the Touch to be locally ready for retail which might be in, oh... six months to never.
Damn you Steve Jobs...
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