News New iPods, New iTunes Localisations

As had been widely rumoured on the net, and discussed before GOO woke up and smelled the coffee, Apple announced it's Picture iPod yesterday - along with a special edition 'U2' iPod. The photo pod also has a new style dock that has an s-video out on it, so slideshows can be presented on a big screens.

At the same time, they announced a basketfull of new iTunes music stores. So, if you're in Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, or Spain, you too can join the iTunes party. Songs will be sold at the same 0.99 euro rate as the French and German iTMS. Those in the know are puzzled though over why Ireland wasn't among the new inclusions, or Austrialia and Japan (two areas that where hottly tipped to be in this raft of stores).

Anyhoo, I guess you'll want to see what the little blighters look like. Gizmodo has some good pics here, here, here and here

Oh, and of course you could dip your shoes in some loafer lightner and mince on over to the Apple website for more info as well... You could then join the rest of the bit Mac User Group for cocktails in the Blue Oyster Bar afterwards.

 

I'm liking the blck iPod and the picture one, but I've got my iRiver H320 now, so I should stop looking at them .

 

Make the dial black too, and get rid of those sigs on the back, then I'll take one over the white version.

However, picture iPod - colour screen mmmmmmmm


probably shight battery life

 

15hrs is quoted, but only if you're just playing music. If you're doing a slide show at the same time, it drops considerably.

 

Actually the Photo iPod is a bit thicker, and has a much bigger battery. So it'll go for a bit more than the others, guarunteed.

 

hmmm, ok then that is pretty good - still, too many pennies at the moment though...

 

What I am really waiting for is for someone to start making a decent sized solid state player - what with Compact Flash cards now available in 4GB sizes (I'm sure I've heard a rumour of 16GB as well) it can't be long now... with no moving parts the battery should last for ages, it could be tiny, and if they actually used compact flash there would be no limit to how much music you carried about with you...

 

There is already players that run off of compact flash cards. they are like 150 bucks.The 2 that I saw had no lcd or anything on them though. Certainly not the ideal player. It would be nice if there was one with the look of an ipod, color screen, removable compact storage for any size, and an esily removable battery.

Doesnt look like anyone wants to do this though. then there would be no reason to buy newer updated versions of mp3 players.

 

actually the 4gb compactflash cards aren't flash memory devices. they use the hitachi microdrive. the 16gb one is probably a hard drive too.

 

Pretec 12GB CF. Unfortunately, they cost about $1000 bucks per Gb.

 

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1040_22-5427283.html

I know it's not CF, but that's all I could find for now. I know that they have 4gb solid state CF.

 

This is why there wont be any 4gb solid state players any time soon.....

 

yep, flash memory is uber expensive at the moment. i know high-capacity flash memory devices exist, but they're not exactly aimed at a consumer demographic...

 

Yeah, but it still doesn't play videos. and the screen sucks, sizewise. the Archos Medai think is Much better, bigger HD and bigger screen.

 

*cough* Hi-MD 1GB disc costs $10 *cough*

Nezuji

 

u2 ipod very sexy

 

MiniDisc...ewww

Actually, flash memory isn't too expensive. But those 4GB+ CF cards are merely tiny hard drives that are the same size as CF cards that can be used instead of CF cards. They aren't actually flash memory cards, they're hdds.

 

that's exactly what i said

flash memory is still very expensive though, especially for the high-capacity devices. note, FLASH MEMORY. not compact-flash cards. read.

 

And never will, according to Jobs. He's dead set against a video player iPod. And as for the screen, it's there to preview photos (which are supposed to be shown on a TV via the video-out) or show album cover art. So the size is fine for what it's designed to do.

 

I’m surprised at the video thing, they could have integrated QuickTime and could have given you the ability to sync movie trailers, music videos or any other QuickTime file to it via iTunes. I mean they could have charged you for the music videos.

The only problem I could see with an iPod that played video would be the fact it would only support MPG and AVI (QT) which are formats I would wouldn’t want to use on a portable device. The file format of choice should be Xvid