iPhone News Updated

Apple iTunes, iPod upgrades a quiet burst of sound

Apple media events are always preceded by Soviet-scale secrecy, and thus they’re always a cause for much anticipation and excitement. I didn’t attend Wednesday’s music event personally, but I was pretty excited all the same. The cause: on air and in print, I had shot my mouth off pretty heroically over the previous week about things Apple would definitely not be announcing.

I was confident that there’d be no announcements about the Beatles catalogue coming to the iTunes Store. EMI is still entrenched in their “nobody has ever ever ever pirated Beatles music over the Internet, and we have the lack of iTunes availability to thank for that” mindset.

An Apple Tablet? Where this device is concerned, thunder must precede the rain. So far, not a single rumble on that front. Done and done.

Instead, Apple released a significant upgrade to one iPod, tweaked the other three models, and released an update to iTunes (with an accompanying update to the iPhone/iPod Touch OS) that has significantly delighted me in the 36 hours since I downloaded it.

We all expected some hardware bumps for the iPod Touch. Instead, Apple announced a serious price drop: the 32 gig model has been cut $120 to $280, and the cheapest 8 gig Touch is now (just) under $200. Oh, and there’s also a new 64 gig model ($399)…but that’s probably an afterthought.

I often refer to the Touch as “an iPhone for people who are happy with their Blackberries.” You get an awesome media player and access to what’s certainly the mobile industry’s most impressive library of apps.

That’s not incorrect. And it’s surprising to learn just how many Apple has sold: 40% of the devices running iTunes App Store apps are iPod Touches.

Apple is clarifying the story of the Touch, and pushing new buttons. The new message: the iPod Touch is a computer. And it’s a game machine. To underscore the point, they made a totally fair comparison between the Touch and a netbook, demonstrating that you can’t fit a netbook into the back pocket of your jeans.

(“You lie!” I would have shouted at the podium. And as my fellow Congresspeople gasped and censured me, I would have hushed them up by closing my ASUS netbook and easily slipping it into the back pocket of my 511 Tactical Pants. So there!)

Apple also points out that there are currently 21,000 entertainment and gaming titles in the App Store, as opposed to 3800 titles for the Nintendo DS and mere hundreds for the Sony PSP. I am embarrassed to admit that I didn’t think to ask “Wait, does that “21,000 titles” figure include all of those flatulence synthesizers, or all they all big, muscular console-style games?”

Still, it’s significant that Apple is devoting so much air to that talking point. They’re about to feel some serious heat from competing “pocket-sized but big-screen” media players. Coincidentally, just the other morning FedEx delivered the new iPods and Microsoft’s new Zune HD.

If I put on my Speculation Trilby, I’d also reckon that this shift is the opening overture towards the rollout of a future tablet device based on the iPhone and iPods’ core technologies. Apple clearly wants to put a new phrase into play: “This is a computer, not a phone or a media player.”

Onward to the iPod Shuffle. A price drop: the minimum buy-in is now just $59 for 2 gigs, and Five Fresh Fashion Colors are on the menu.

I think the Shuffle is lucky just to remain part of the lineup. It had a vital role to fulfill when all of the music on the iTunes Store was locked in proprietary DRM: folks on a budget had no way to play iTunes purchases away from their computers, and therefore no reason to buy music from Apple in the first place. Now that I can buy the new John Doe album from iTunes as unlocked, high-quality files and play it on a $50 device available at any drugstore, the Shuffle is starting to look expendable.

Speaking of Marked For Death: the iPod Classic, like Carl Yastrzemski in his final three seasons with the Red Sox, hobbled out to the field, pleasing the old timers who grew up idolizing the once-spunky hard-drive based music player the size of a pack of playing cards.

I wonder how much longer it’ll be around. The marketplace seems to have found its “sweet spot” for mobile media capacity and they don’t seem to need the 160 gigabyte capacity of the new Classic (yes, an oxymoron; please let’s move on), selling for $249. As always, the Classic will be for DJs, monster media users, and folks who simply want a portable hard drive that doubles as a media player.

And now, the star attraction: the iPod Nano.

The Nano has always been an indispensable part of the iPod line. It’s not the most affordable iPod, but it’s the affordable iPod that people actually want. It’s the iPod built for action and exercising. It’s also the perfect one for kids. See Point One about affordability. But it’s also an iPod that can’t connect to the Internet and thus it’s the iPod that parents are perfectly happy to let their kids have.

That might change, now that it includes a video camera. I’m certain that the first time a kid limps home with a sprained wrist, a broken skateboard, and uncountable scrapes and bruises, he’ll be forced to turn over his Nano before video of the awesome stunt that his friends goaded him into trying even has a chance to go up on YouTube.

It records full 30 frame-per-second 640×480 video with sound. And with 8 gigs of storage, it can record hours and hours of video.

It’s certainly meant to be a “fun” camera, as opposed to something you’d record a court deposition with. But it’s a nice wrinkle. The Nano’s size hasn’t changed since last year and neither has its price. It’s still $149 — $30 more buys you double the capacity — so you’re essentially getting a standard-def Flip Mino for “free” inside the same package.

Videos are copied onto your desktop on sync. A built in speaker lets you preview what you’ve just shot. The new microphone provoked the inclusion of a new Voice Memo feature as well.

Another addition: access to a free wireless streaming audio service, which gives you unlimited free plays of commercial, copyrighted content for the life of the device.

I’m unfamiliar with this service, so I’ll just need to check the press release. Ah! Here it is: it’s called “FM radio,” apparently, and Apple has succeeded in getting coverage for this system all over the world. Nice work, that.

Buuuut seriously. The FM radio plays through a built-in buffer, so you can pause the audio and even rewind a bit. If you like the current song, the Nano can pull special iTunes tags from the broadcast signal to “bookmark” the track for future purchase from the iTunes store. At launch, all Clear Channel radio stations support the new iTunes tags.

(A full review of the new Nano will come next week.)

The Nano is quite lovely. But it’s this latest edition of iTunes that has made me go all giggly.

Let’s get the bad stuff right out of the way: it’s a little unstable. I’ve been poking at it rather intensely over the past couple of days and I’ve managed to crash the app twice.

But hell … these things will be fixed. And if you spend any time syncing an iPhone or an iPod, iTunes 9’s new features in that regard are worth twenty crashes a day. (Okay, well, not really. But two? No question.)

Apple has added a lot more control and thought to the process of synchronizing content. The changes are spread across every content category, and they start with one simple but violently-good tweak: As you move from tab to tab, changing sync settings for Music, Movies, TV Shows, etc., iTunes no longer tries to re-sync the device every time you move to a new tab. You can make all of your changes and then iTunes will sync the device all at once.

And each category is now packed with options. You’re a sensible person, so of course you always want all of your Diana Damrau tracks to go on your device, always. Just check the name of that artist in the “Music” tab. You can select Artists and Genres. This one feature removes the need for a half-dozen custom Smart Playlists that I’ve been using for years.

Podcast syncing has been bumped up as well. You now have access to individual episodes of every podcast, right in the syncing tab, making it dead-simple to “point and shoot” the episodes you want to take with you.

When we come to the new mechanism for syncing iPhone and iPod Touch apps, however, I need to balance myself on the line separating my gratitude for getting a great new feature and my lingering resentment that it took so long to arrive. See, you’re now free to manually arrange application icons, page after page, directly within iTunes. The page order and layout will be honored on sync. What a huge relief. The old iTunes was annoying. You’d laboriously rearrange your icons just the way you like them by dragging them around on the touchscreen, but the moment you added a new app, it’d land damned-near anywhere and louse up your organization.

Oh, and the cherry on top of iTunes 9’s new syncing features? There’s a new, discreet little checkbox: “Automatically fill free space with songs.” If there’s 30 megabytes left over after you’ve packed your iPhone with music, video, and apps, iTunes won’t let it go to waste. So simple, yet so valuable.

“Home Sharing” is another good example of “Simple, valuable, and what took you guys so long?” iTunes has allowed library sharing for years. I keep terabytes of music and video on my office computer. I can passively stream it through any other iTunes library in the house.

This new feature goes beyond streaming. iTunes 9 lets me copy media from one library to another within iTunes. The feature only works between machines that have been linked to the same iTunes Store account (meaning: a total of five Macs and PCs), but it’s not limited to iTunes Store content. Copying a ripped DVD from the massive server downstairs to the MacBook I sync my iPhone to was once a hairy bother. Now, it ain’t nothin’.

Apple has been steadily building upon iTunes’ and the iPods’ “Genius” feature since its inception. You select a track and tell iTunes “Build me a playlist inspired by this song.” iTunes identifies other songs in your library that “go well with” the one you’ve selected.

It manages it through a gi-normous database at Apple Galactic HQ that uses … well … lots of math, and hardcore analysis of the playlists of real users. All you need to know is that Genius intuitively understands that David Bowie’s “Life On Mars” is a natural track to follow Barenaked Ladies’ “Theme to ‘Big Bang Theory’.”

iTunes’ new “Genius Mixes” feature takes the human out of the equation completely: imagine the Genius feature, only you don’t even need to choose a song first. It’s as if I threw my library’s 5328 songs into a huge New Year’s party, allowed them all to mingle, and then checked back to see which ones were hanging out with each other. Each one of those cliques shows up as one of twelve “Genius Mixes.”

It seems to work well. I’m playing a Genius Mix right now (“Alternative & Punk Mix 2”) and I’ve already had that wonderful experience of thinking “This is a great song; I should go on iTunes and buy it” and then realizing that I already owned it, buried buried deep on an album I never play all the way through.

I just wish I had a little more control. Clicking on “Genius Mixes” reveals a dozen boxes that look eerily like the Companion Cubes in “Portal.” All you get is a vague label: “Folk Mix based on: Asylum Street Spankers, Arlo Guthrie & Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, & others.” iTunes doesn’t show you a tracklist, or a menu of options, or even a piece of album art. I’d like to now add four stars to Ben Harper’s “Ground On Down” so it’ll turn up in future “favorite music” playlists, but I can’t. I’m reduced to using the title inside a column I’m writing, so I don’t lose track of it.

These “Genius Mixes” are available for syncing. And their contents shift as your listening habits and library content changes. So despite the vaguely-sinister GlaDOS vibe it gives off, it’s a cheap and easy way to keep your favorite music cycling through your iPod and iPhone, with minimal effort.

The basic Genius feature now also extends to iPhone apps. Apple will recommend apps to you based on the collections of apps you already own. Yeah, it’s a way to encourage you to spend more money on the App Store, but if it helps clear away the soul-numbing sludge of looking for stuff on the App Store, I’m all for it.

(Genius for Apps, and a collection of other minor enhancements and bugfixes, arrive in the form of the iPhone OS 3.1 update. It’s available for download immediately.)

The most curious element of iTunes 9 is the radical redesign of the iTunes Store itself. iTunes 8.0 and earlier editions behaved like a desktop app. iTunes 9 appears to load the iTunes Store content as though it were nothing more than a webpage.

Oh, it’s a positive change. I seem to get more information per click, and it’s a much cleaner look…often to the extreme of appearing stark.

But the comparison to a web browser is no fluke. Less than a day after iTunes 9 became available for downloading, people traced the app’s network traffic and the cry “Soylent iTunes is made from WebKit!” was raised. A sufficiently clever individual can now access the iTunes Store from a web browser, using a simple hack.

In any event, the whole store has received a sugary coating of Reorganization which makes the experience far more palatable.

All in all, Apple’s music event was a big deal, even if it didn’t feature Ringo and Paul on stage with the surviving members of The Who and setting fire to the stage. Steve Jobs was back, opening the event with a classy — and uncharacteristically open — tribute to the anonymous young man who signed an organ donor card and allowed Jobs to receive a new liver.

Next week, other companies will start the annual deluge of hopeful iPod-killers. I’ve seen some of them. Nothing can kill the iPod, of course, but at the end of this round the iPod Touch’s cut man might have his hands full.

That’s for tomorrow. Right now, Genius Mix has played a Tom Waits song followed by a slow Pogues tune, and I have a desperate need now to drink until I throw up. Man, that Genius feature is spot-on, isn’t it?

[Thanks: http://www.suntimes.com]

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