Steve Jobs as usual strolls on stage in jeans and black shirt and starts off with the newest and impressive looking stores Apple has recently opened in Paris and China. He then proceeds going over Apples sales numbers as usual as to how many iOS devices have been sold and how many apps and songs have been downloaded. Like Apple or not the numbers are nothing short of amazing.
Now to the good stuff. It looks like most of the rumors I saw out on the web over the last month were pretty spot on. It seems Apple is having a tougher time keeping things a secret.
All 3 iPods got a refresh with the iPod Nano and iPod Touch getting the biggest upgrades.
The iPod Shuffle make over was basically giving it back the physical buttons as customers requested. It's thinner and keeps all the features from the last version with voice over and such. Priced at just $49 with new colors it's an easy stocking stuffer and a good move on Apples part.
iPod Nano the biggest upgrade lost the touch wheel completely reclaiming the space of entire bottom of the device and got a touch screen for navigation. Much smaller then before and they added a clip on the back of it like the Shuffle so you can now wear it. Bad for the makers of armbands. MultiTouch was added so you can rotate the screen for viewing at any angle. It's thinner with an really nice 24 hour battery life of constant music play. Complete interface redesign to work with the touch screen. Shake it and it will give you a new song. Most other features the same. Includes FM tuner that shows Artist and Song as well as the pedometer and Nike stuff. The size, clip, interface and touch screen make it a winner.
iPod Touch is another big winner. Now with a forward facing camera for the new FaceTime video so you can talk to anyone else that has a iPodTouch or iPhone face to face. More devices with this technology are sure to come as Apple made the technology open source. It also received a HD camera on the back for shooting video that you can upload directly to YouTube. You can now also use the iMovie App to edit the movie directly on the Touch before uploading the YouTube. I think this is going to be a huge leap for them as it is basically going to give no one a reason to buy Mini Pocket HD cameras like the Flip Mino.
Game Center was demo'd here for the iPod Touch which allows you to play any Multiplayer game with friends that are not even in the same room with you. And if you don't have enough friends available to play Game Center will just find someone else playing the game to match you up with so you'll never be alone. It also keeps track of your scores and how well you are doing against your friends and others. Steve made a point here to go over numbers that put this way out in front of Sony and Nintendo showing that the iPod Touch has a 50% market share in hand held gaming and more than both companies combined. With Game Center they could keep their lead in this space.
Steve Jobs also went back over the new features of iOS 4.1 and announced that it will be coming out for iPhones and iPod Touches in one week. This update includes many Bug Fixes and includes the new Game Center. iPad owners still have to wait till November when iOS 4.2 is released to bring them up to speed with all the nice iOS 4.x features. Not sure why that is but apparently tying together the software difference is a big undertaking. Either that or they have something else up their sleeve. Or perhaps they wanted the iPhone and iPod Touch which had releases after the iPad release to have goodies the iPad doesn't yet. Pure speculation on my part.
iTunes 10 which they gave a few tweaks to but the main addition is the Social Sharing for Music feature called "Ping" and is being released today. You can now follow your favorite Artists from iTunes and see where they are playing next, what they are chatting about and lots more. See video clips they upload, leave comments and the like. Also you can follow friends and have them follow you so you can see what concerts they are going to, what music they are downloading and what their favorite songs and artists are. Basically this is a Facebook / Twitter / Flicker type thing only for Music. This very well could be the last straw for MySpace. Does anyone still even use that? Crickets...
And then there was the "One more thing" which is a pretty big update to their hobby Apple TV. They reduced it in size by 80 percent making it small enough to hold in your hand. They stripped off the aluminum housing and ripped out the hard drive and are going all streaming with it. Basically just two plugs, the power cord and and HDMI out to connect directly to your HD TV. Apple simplicity at it's best. They lined up deals with the Major studios for renting HD Movies the day they come out on DVD so no waiting in line but I think the $4.99 for new releases and $3.99 for older releases still could come down. Where they did good was HD TV shows are available for just 99 cents rentals. So far just ABC and Fox shows are available. You can also stream directly any and all content from your computer like Music, Movies and Photos. But the big deal is that they added NetFlix to the mix so if you have say a NetFlix account you can now stream all their Watch Instantly movies and TV shows right to your TV with a great looking interface. Best of all they reduced the price from $229 to just $99 for the new Apple TV.
Then the lead singer from Cold Play came out and sang 3 songs to close the show. And that's all...