"Funnest" is an awfully strong word for a couple of iPods
Hey, everyone! Did you hear? There's iPod nanos with colors and thinner iPod touches and ... oh, you know what? As predicted, I can barely bring myself to type the exclamation points. Yes, new versions of old gadgets, will sell zillions of units for the Christmas holiday, etc., etc.
QuickTime? QuickTime? I want my Genius Playlists, darn you!
The thing that most intrigues me is, as you can see from the screenshot above, not available yet, despite Steve's sunny promises. iTunes 8, which will hopefully be available to download shortly, contains one of those features that sound kind of frivolous -- Genius Playlists, which basically search for songs in your playlist similar to the one you've got playing -- but may affect how people interact with music a lot. I've heard it said that iPod is really affecting the concept of the album, as more and more people are content to just throw their whole collection on Shuffle mode (I sure am); perhaps Genius Playlists will add a bit of smarts to this process. Based on the keynote, this will be based on some kind of "people who like this also like this" database rather than mysterious digital analysis of the music itself; I'm interested to see how it works with my music collection, as I don't go through the hassle of tagging any of my songs, and think that some of the genre identification provided by Gracenote is a bit off.
One thing not in the iTunes update is the iTunes Unlimited subscription service concept that was being talked about in fevered tones mere weeks ago -- and good riddance to it, I say. On the other hand, it does include HD movies and TV shows -- including the NBC shows that vanished last year. Huzzah for those of us who always missed 30 Rock and The Office!
The other big news -- though it will take a while to find out how big -- is the bump up to 2.1 of the iPhone OS. Will the dropped calls finally cease?
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