Apple Rocks: rest of World is underwhelmed!

Steve — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:44:07 +0000

Original article: Apple Rocks: rest of World is underwhelmed!
From Machines that go Bing

Apple this evening held its much hyped Let’s Rock! event, the first after Peter Oppenheimer said that Apple had in the pipeline “technologies that our competition will not be able to match”. Rumours of tablets and new ipod models ensued.

iTunes 8

The latest update to iTunes includes the following:

HD TV shows for $2.99
SD TV shows now $1.99
NBC is back
New navigation (Genius)

In case you forgot NBC will bring Monk, The Office, Battlestar Galactica, 30 Rock, Heroes and some more (all HD).

In iTunes 8, you can now browse by album cover and toggle Albums, Artists, Genres and Composers in the tabs at the top. So, for any artist, you can scan through all their albums if you scrub over their icon, just like in iPhoto.

Genius allows you to automatically make playlists from tracks in your library that sound great together (in theory). The sidebar also make recommendations from the iTunes Store that ‘Go Great) with what you’re playing (I hope that can be switched off as it’s basically just clever spam!).

iTunes Nano

It’s just as predicted by so many renderings circulating the web for the last two weeks, Smooth, rounded elliptical profile. Steve tells us that it’s the thinnest iPod ever.

Features:

Shake to shuffle
Coverflow
Eight lurid colours (no white!)
8 GB ($149)
16GB ($199)

Steve also makes many claims about the environmental friendliness of the new nano including:

arsenic-free glass
BFR-free
mercury free
PVC-free
highly recyclable

iPod Touch

Also redesigned. It’s thinner and in coloured steel. Also features:

Integrated volume control
Speaker
Genius playlist creation
Built-in Nike receiver
2.1 software
Nike+
Genius playlists

Who cares about any of this? Does it really justify a media event or could it have just been posted up on the Apple.com site as a collection of incremental upgrades?

Samsung releases P2 and P3 player photos

Steve — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:11:32 +0000

Original article: Samsung releases P2 and P3 player photos
From Machines that go Bing

Samsung is soon to launch its S2 and S3 MP3 players and has been hyping them up since March but no photos or specs were forthcoming. Well now the wait is over and style as well as substance seems to be the order of the day.

The S2 seems to have been inspired by the Creative Zen Stone and is pebble-shaped. It has no screen but an LED in the base which flashes pulses to indicate which playback mode is selected. Capacity is 1GB and power is from a rechargeable lithium-polymer battery which Samsung claims will last for 13 hours of playback.

The S3 is more conventional in appearance and is 0.4 inches thick. The screen is a 1.8 inch LCD affair so it is certainly clunkier than its main competition, the iPod Nano. Colour choices are green, red, blue, black and white and the S3 will display photos as well as playing WMA and MP3 audio files. Capacity or 4GB or 8GB. Battery life is claimed to be 25 hours of audio or 4 hours of video.

Both players should be in stores in June but prices have not been announced yet.