We're not sure when the sale ends—maybe ALK hasn't decided—but if you have at least a marginal interest in GPS apps for your iPhone or Android, it might be time to plunk down some cash for it. $20 ain't free, and CoPilot's looks sometimes verge on gaudy, but it's a competent, frequently updated app, and now a steal compared to even the cheapest subscription GPS app. [Android Version; iPhone Version; iTunes Link]

Update: This offer is extended until 9am Eastern Time on Tuesday, December 1st.

The Uffizi Galley, a museum in Florence boasting one of the world's most famous collections of Renaissance art, is readying touch screen stations where visitors will be able to browse the museum's collection in a Cover Flow-esque format. The stations, dubbed "Uffizi in a Touch," were developed by an Italian company called Centrica and will be loaded with 100-megapixel shots of the Uffizi's most famous works which include Boticelli's The Birth of Venus and Titian's Venus of Urbino.

The novel technology, rolling out in December, will presumably have one of two effects: cheapening the Uffizi's masterpieces or elevating the elusive properly tagged iTunes library to work of art status. [CultofMac]

A few days ago, we found out that Apple Corps and EMI would finally release the Beatles' catalog in a digital format. It's not that we couldn't have just purchased CDs and ripped them—that's what everyone's been doing for years now—it's just that it felt like progress. In reality, it was just the near-random actions of someone who has no idea what's going on, at all. From the Guardian via Ars, Paul McCartney's view on selling the Beatles' music online:

I met [EMI's chief executive] on a plane once. I said: "What is the problem? I want to do it, we all want to do it." And he explained that in the deal that we want, they feel exposed. If [digitised Beatles music] gets out, if one employee decides to take it home and wap it on to the internet, we would have the right to say, "Now you recompense us for that. And they're scared of that."

Just to be clear, Paul McCartney says he wants to sell music online, but he—and his record company—are worried that someone could conceivably download it, upload it back to the internet, and open the floodgates to piracy. As opposed to just uploading the higher-quality digital files you're selling to people on Apple-shaped USB drives right now, or on CDs, more than a decade ago. McCartney expects an agreement by which he would be compensated if people share his music, as if it would be somehow correlated with the release of Beatles' tracks online, which EMI—no stranger to releasing music online—is scared of because it's insane.

Poor Paul! Someone should tell him, you know, about all the wapping. [Ars Technica]

UPDATE: From anonymized (not anonymous) source who researched similar subjects in the past, a possible explanation:

It's not the music for sale they're worried about but the raw remasters (this is why McCartney specifically refers to an employee potentially uploading the music). I don't know how much you've read about the making of [Beatles Rock Band] but they went to incredible lengths to protect the masters. It was only towards the end of the project that Harmonix received the (heavily encrypted) music they needed; before then, Apple Corps had been sending them "dirtied-up" copies of the music just in case it was intercepted halfway.

The real threat from McCartney and the other Beatles (and er, spouses of Beatles) is that if, somewhere in the process of turning their music into iTunes-friendly files, the MASTERS get leaked... then they will sue the pants off of EMI. And EMI allegedly said they are in such a precarious financial position that they do not want to take the risk of getting hit by a lawsuit that could take the company down.

An alternate theory, which still doesn't quite work. If masters leaked to the internet, presumably they'd be encoded in something like FLAC at best, which would be indistinguishable from the files the Beatles are OK with selling on USB drives right now. Or if this refers to the recording's component parts, like the ones used to create Rock Band, still: This seems avoidable. And in either strain of paranoia: Paul McCartney doesn't understand the internet. (And possibly other things, too!)

Trade in Your DVDs, Plus a Couple Bucks, and Get the Blu-ray Versions

Warner set up a DVD to Blu-ray exchange program called, appropriately enough, DVD2Blu, as sort of a more-tempting version of its HD-DVD to Blu-ray version. The problem is, it's not actually that great of a deal; you're limited to Warner movies, obviously, but it also costs $8-10 per DVD, plus $5 shipping, for the exchange. You might actually be better off just hitting Best Buy or Walmart or whatever and looking for sales, since DVD2Blu could cost you 18 bucks plus the agony of waiting for your new HD copy of The Wedding Singer: Totally Awesome Edition to arrive. [Engadget]

Steve Ballmer Acknowledges Apple's Gains, Remains Cocky

Microsoft held a shareholder's meeting this morning, led by the always-dynamic Steve Ballmer, and an interesting question came up: Why does Microsoft have such a lousy reputation among certain demographics, like, say, upper-middle-class college kids? Ballmer admitted that Apple's been seeing some gains that, while small, are a clear sign that Microsoft has room for improvement, either in marketing or product positioning. It's a pretty clear-headed statement from Ballmer—after all, he notes, Microsoft still has an insane marketshare, even in the high-end consumer demo, so despite Apple's visibility, Microsoft doesn't exactly have cause for concern. That level-headedness is why this story's in Remainders: Where's the explosive, frothing-at-the-mouth, prone to Bidenesque gaffes Ballmer we all know and, um, know? [TechFlash]

Sanyo to Build Houses Powered by Solar Energy and Li-Ion Batteries

Sanyo, considered Japan's "greenest" electronics manufacturer (sort of like being the best-dressed homeless person), is about to start building solar-powered, lithium-ion-based homes in its native country. The houses are all equipped with LED lighting, solar-powered water heater, all that stuff. They'll be a little pricey, at around $355,000—an equivalent non-green house would cost $62,000 less, although the Sanyo houses come with a $30,000 government subsidy. It's in Remainders because it's Japan only, and because I don't understand enough Japanese to learn any more about it. [Crunchgear]

Sony Announces Vague "iTunes-Like" Store on PlayStation Network for Books, Movies, Music

Sony announced the tentatively named Sony Online Service today—it's described as an "iTunes-like" service on the PlayStation Network, offering movies, music, and books, all media for which Sony also sells accompanying hardware. It'll also allow users to upload their own video, and will probably have support for independent app development later on down the road. We don't really know much else, like, say, a launch date or pricing (or even a final name), so it winds up here, alone in the dark corner of Gizmodo we call Remainders. [AppleInsider via Engadget]

Called iTunes Preview, you can now access any iTunes music page through your browser by selecting "Copy Link" and pasting it Firefox, Safari, IE, whatever you use.

At the moment, Apple isn't doing very much with iTunes Preview. Sure, you can view music (videos and other media not yet online), but to buy or preview anything, you're redirected into iTunes software. In that way, iTunes Preview really lives up (or down) to its humble name—it's a non-interactive preview of iTunes content for people who haven't loaded the software (as well as bloggers who'd just like to link a webpage rather than an app). But is it so crazy to imagine a day when Apple allows us to buy music free from the confines of their software?

Yes, yes it is. [iTunes Preview via AppleInsider]

So say you're at the airport. You want to rent, I dunno, some movie that wasn't good enough to see in the theater. You just format a spare SD card filled with vacation photos you'd forgotten to back up (it doesn't appear they give you a card, but I could be mistaken), pop it in the machine, select a movie, pay $4 or so, and then have the film loaded on your card, a la ticking time bomb, with DRM.

And what can't you do with an SD card? I mean, it plays in my iPhone...wait...I mean my Blackberry...wait...

Mini SD and Micro SD—those are the cards that most of our mobile devices will take (if they take any at all)! In case no one told you, Blockbuster, we can't play this shit back on our digital cameras.

(Granted, netbook owners and some laptop owners will be able to utilize the standard.)

Ah Blockbuster, you've arrived just in time to ignore the growing popularity of iTunes/Zune Marketplace syncing, 3G streaming and in-flight Wi-Fi all while offering your service on a medium less convenient than DVD. But don't worry, I'm not angry. You're just hurting yourself. [Fast Company]

What surprises me about these facts and figures—apart from iTunes skyrocketing again after the introduction of variable pricing—is the fact that CDs are not completely dead yet. They are clearly going down, but I had this mental image in which all of those round mirrors were destroyed, melting like Dali clocks in a desert of indifference. [Mint]

But don't hold your breath on it happening yet: Peter Kafka has "yet to hear of a single programmer that has made a firm commitment." As he points out, while networks are constantly looking for new revenue, like those asshole aliens in Independence Day moving from world to world consuming every natural resource, they're nervous about the idea for a lot of reasons.

A lot of it has to do with the icky, sticky relationships between networks and cable operators, where everybody's worried about losing out as people start to watch more and more TV content online, not in their living room—where streaming video eats up bandwidth, and advertising revenues aren't nearly as rich (which is why Hulu wants to figure out new ways to get you to pay).

While these little complications might slow the process down, the exodus is inevitable. There's no stopping this. The internet is the new cable: Netflix, Hulu, BitTorrent. Apple might not get to launch it in a few months, but it will happen. Just give it time. The actually crazy part, if you ask me, is that the Apple TV might even live up to its name. [Hulu]

Even Palm, who used this feature as a symbol of their underdog status, repeatedly defied a notoriously litigious behemoth and just wanted to give their users an easy way to sync music? Yes. It's a clear stunt to garner sympathy as a scruffy up-and-comer, it's in defiance of published USB standards, and Apple is clearly never, ever going to stop patching this "bug." You've got bigger things to worry about.

And even Apple, who's just trying to maintain control over a proprietary media player, and who has every right to do so? Yes. To users, the updates look weirdly protective, and make the company seem dickish, which here, they kind of are.

It's like watching children locked in a yes/no argument over whether or not licorice tastes good, and both parties should just leave it. I don't say this because I prefer Palm users to be locked out of iTunes or something—it's just that that's where things stand right now, it's the status quo and devoting any more energy to this protracted fight would be a waste. Apple can ignore this, because it shouldn't matter to them, and Palm should tell Prefolk to sync with doubleTwist, because that works—now even with the Pixi—just fine. Thanks in advance! [PreCentral]

iTunes 9.0.2 adds support for Apple TV software version 3.0, adds an option for a dark background for Grid View, and improves support for accessibility. [Ed. note: The dark background option is a bigger deal than it might seem]

iTunes 9 comes with many new features and improvements, including:

• An improved look and feel, including a new Column Browser for easily browsing your artists or albums, movies, TV shows, and more.

• iTunes Store has a brand new look, with improved navigation for quick and easy exploration.

• iTunes LP and iTunes Extras create unique experiences that feature exclusive interviews, videos, photos, and more - available with select album and movie purchases on the iTunes Store.

• Home Sharing helps you manage your family's iTunes collection between computers in your home. iTunes can automatically transfer new purchases, or you can choose just the items you want.

• Genius Mixes are created for you by iTunes and play songs from your library that go great together.

• iPod and iPhone syncing now allows you to organize your iPhone and iPod touch home screens directly in iTunes. Syncing is now also more flexible, allowing you to sync individual artists, genres, or TV show and Podcast episodes.

• iTunes U items are now organized into their own section in your iTunes library.

• Sync with iPod nano (5th generation), iPod classic (Fall 2009), and iPod touch (Fall 2009).

• iTunes 9 also includes many other improvements, such as HE-AAC encoding and playback, more flexibility with Smart Playlists rules, simpler organization of your media files inside an iTunes Media folder, and more.

Deja vu, am I right? [Apple]

Why Extras—which are like DVD extras, with bonus clips, interviews and photo galleries, but for iTunes movies—is just now on its way to Apple TV is sorta mystifying, even for their most neglected product. (What does Apple have against its tinier boxes?) It's like, the thing Apple makes expressly to plug into your TV, where you might want to watch those things.

Since Apple TV 2.0, the last major update to the sad little box happened almost two years ago, maybe, just maybe, there's more to Apple TV 3.0 than just Extras and iTunes LP. Or you know, not. [AppleInsider]

Only about 93,000 have actually hit the App Store so far, but still, it's pretty incredible. Expect some crowing via press release when they formally hit 100,000 apps in the store. A month ago, Apple hit 2 billion downloads. And it was just about a year ago this mosaic, celebrating a mere 10,000 apps, was created. Wonder what it's gonna look like a year from now. [App Shopper NextWeb via Twitter]

Google's already got a decent music search engine in place, and they've got plenty of experience designing iTunes-like client apps like Picasa, but let's not get ahead of ourselves—we don't even know what this thing is, how it'll be supported, what kind of content it'll have, or how much it'll cost. Consider their Chinese service, Top100.cn: The free, all-you-can-eat model makes sense there, where download piracy rates approach 100% and music industry revenues, despite massive listenership, don't even touch $90 million dollars. in that context, Google's projected $14.6 million in ad revenue counts as a victory.

But here, the music industry sees ten billion dollars pass through its hands on a yearly basis, and people still (occasionally!) pay for music. Even assuming higher per-click ad values, it's hard to see how Google could just give full downloads out for free. Maybe it could stream, like Spotify? Or, you know, just sell music, like iTunes? Techcrunch doesn't seem to have much in the way of leads on this, but they leave it here:

We're still gathering details, but our understanding is the service will be very different to the Google China music download service that they launched in 2008. That service, which is only available in China, allows users to search for music and download it for free.

Place your bets in the comments.

UPDATE: Peter Kafka at AllThingsD has some sources of his own, all of whom seem to want to pee on our parade:

Sources describe the service, which will be called "One Box", as a refined set of answers for music queries. The idea: Punch in, say, "Madonna", and you'll be presented with one or more songs, which may be partial clips or full-length versions, then guided to other sites where you can purchase the music.

He fingers iLike and LaLa as the primary music providers. All in all, this just sounds like a new search interface—not a new iTunes, Spotify-killer, or anything else worth getting overly excited about. Oh well! [Techcrunch, AllThingsD]

The App Store is a strange new place for developers. Veterans and newcomers engage in bareknuckle combat, driving prices down to levels people wouldn't have imagined charging just a few years ago. Margins drop to razor-thin levels while customers expect apps to get cheaper and cheaper, but with ever increasing quality and depth.

For developers, for other software platforms and potentially for the increasingly fickle customers themselves, it's uncharted, and treacherous, territory. But the most bizarre thing of all is—in an effort to keep people in the App Store, and to prevent competitors from getting a toehold in the mobile app business—Apple's charting a course straight into it.

"The App Store is a very competitive environment," says Caroline Hu Flexer, co-founder of Duck Duck Moose, an indie developer of children's edutainment apps like Itsy Bitsy Spider. "As an independent developer without a large PR budget or well-known brands, it can be very challenging, and you're pretty much at the mercy of Apple."

The Problem

Most iPhone apps had no life before the App Store, and currently have no life outside it. But with those that did, you start to see a pattern. App prices could reasonably be expected to fall over time—an older game is worth less to customers than a newer game, and with other types of software, a late-stage price drop is a great way to scoop up late adopters. What's strange, though, is how prices dramatically collapse after hitting Apple's store.

Two weeks ago we flagged some bizarre differences in pricing between equivalent PSP and iPhone games. Big titles, like Tetris and Fieldrunners, were inexplicably cheaper on the iPhone, even in cases where it was executed better. This didn't make a whole lot of sense. As it turns out, it had nothing to do with Sony and the PSP, and everything to do with the App Store.

As you can see in the chart above, many apps and services take a price dip in the App Store. Zagat's premium To Go guides cost a healthy $4/month for Windows Mobile phones, but sell for just $10/year on the iPhone. CoPilot 7, a navigation app, used to set you back a full $200 on a Microsoft-badged device (later lowered to $100); the much-improved version 8 sells in the App Store for a measly $35 today. The premium version of WeatherBug runs $5 for people who happened to buy BlackBerry's touchscreen phone, but just $1 for anyone who bought Apple's. VR+ voice recorder, a full-featured dictaphone app, runs $30 on BlackBerry, and an incredible $2 in the App Store. So how can this little App Store, itself a subsection of the iTunes store, squeeze so many developers to the point of near-suffocation?

Update: The BlackBerry Weatherbug app boasts a few extra features over the iPhone app, including push notifications. This accounts for some of the price difference

The Economy

Some of this is pure Econ 101: The store serves a massive, captive audience that's pre-trained to spend money in iTunes. The promise of higher volume makes it easier for developers to lower prices, which they use, along with interesting features and clever marketing, to set themselves apart from the competition.

If things work out just right, the App Store can move a lot of software for you. Spread your lower margins over tens of thousands of sales, and your $2 app could make just as much, if not more, than your old, slower-selling $30 app did. The App Store recently passed the 2-billion-download mark, and there are likely well over 50 million App-Store-ready devices in peoples' hands right now. A vast majority of these downloads—averaging an insane 35 per device—will likely have been free. Only Apple knows just how many. But even if just 5% of the 2 billion downloads were paid for, that's one hell of a market.

It's true that prices are falling as more and more iPhone and iPod Touch owners enter the market. But prices won't stop falling. And more and more developers from all over the world are submitting apps, too, so fewer devs are guaranteed visibility. Not all of the people investing time and money in their products are reaping the return they (reasonably!) expected.

Newsweek's exposé on the end of easy money at the App Store goes a long way toward making the case against going all-in as an iPhone dev. Not only are development costs high, while success appears to be basically randomized. But the story doesn't explain exactly what happened to make the situation so grim.

The Culture

Giz stories rage about app prices all the time, and in your own private way, so do most of you. Buying $1 songs and $2 TV shows has given us an expectation that apps should be cheap, no matter what their use. The glut of free apps you see filling out the app charts every day doesn't help either. Software is worth less to us now, even though we use it more.

I spoke with Steve Andler of Networks In Motion, the company that makes Gokivo. It's an app that we savaged for its introductory price of $10 a month, which then dropped to $5 a month a few weeks ago.

Andler explained reaching the unrealistically low costs with one thing: diminished features. Their app pulls up-to-date map, traffic and POI data from NIM's servers in real time, meaning that—beyond developer costs—they have to constantly pay for new, fresh data to pass on to their customers. But even at $5 a month, it's just about impossible for Gokivo to compete with an app like MotionX GPS Drive, which is $3 a month, or $25 per year.

Andler says there are subtle differences in services offered, which is true—MotionX, for example, doesn't yet read street names aloud when it gives you directions—but your average user probably doesn't know this, and there's a good chance MotionX might add it in an update later on, as their market share and revenues grow. But the damage is done. The app-buying customer is spoiled: As far as we are concerned, turn-by-turn GPS apps should now cost no more than $3 a month, period. This is the new retail, and it's weird.

Loren Brichter, father of Tweetie, is used to getting yelled at by jaded app shoppers. He's charging $3 for Tweetie 2, an update—but a whole new version, really—of his well-established Twitter app. Offering the software as a free upgrade isn't realistic for him:

I priced Tweetie at $2.99 not based on how much work I put into it (it would have been more), or to try and undercut other apps (it would have been less), but simply because I felt like $2.99 was a reasonable price to pay for a Twitter client. Impulse purchase, but not bargain-basement. I never liked playing pricing games either—a popular pastime of other App Store devs. It's always been $2.99, and will probably always be $2.99.

His decision wasn't easy. And even though his app is the darling of the tech press, and has hundreds of great user reviews, he's being lambasted for charging three measly dollars for a high-quality app that people will use again and again and again. Before the App Store, a complaint this petty wouldn't have even made sense.

Apple

From the outside, it appears that Apple is encouraging a race to the bottom. The top 10 lists in each App Store category—one of the only ways for an app to get any meaningful amount of iTunes visibility—are almost exclusively the territory of low-priced impulse buys, and are hard to cling onto for more than a few weeks at time. Flexer, of Duck Duck Moose, says she's experienced it firsthand:

The ranking by volume (as opposed to revenue) on the App Store seems to drive the prices of apps down. Aside from being featured by Apple, exposure of an app is dependent on its ranking in the top lists, so developers lower prices to obtain a higher ranking.

This is echoed and amplified by the makers of Twitterific, an app that, in a bid to stay competitive, saw its price fall from $10 to $4, despite active development and a growing featureset:

While these changes represent perks for users, it also means that sustaining profitability for a given piece of software in the App Store is nearly impossible unless you have a break-away hit.

And if things don't change?

Myself and others like me will have no choice but to focus our development efforts elsewhere.

With yesterday's announcement that Apple is allowing free apps to include in-app purchases, things just got even more tumultuous. Depending on how this is handled, the top "free" apps could all be paid apps in disguise. Either that or the paid app rankings will be dominated by free-on-a-trial-basis teasers. In either case, the rankings open themselves up for opportunistic abuse, and the highest goal for any honest, talented app developer—to just crack that list—just became more uncertain.

This is disastrous for developers, even if it's mostly incidental, and a function of Apple trying to sell apps like they've been selling music for years, despite a totally different set of product types and customer needs. But Apple's effect on pricing goes well beyond incidental. At least in some cases, Apple calls the shots.

A high-profile dev team that has sold a number of apps in the store since the earliest of days, and who accordingly wishes to stay anonymous, told us as much. When they approached Apple with their first app, they had a price in mind. Apple told them it was too high, and that they'd need to cut it to succeed. They chopped it in half. Even then, Apple told them to "be careful."

This company made out fine, since they were in a position to adapt. However, to play the volume game, they had to restructure their entire philosophy around a pricing structure that, just months before, would've seemed ridiculous.

With over 2 billion data points to graph and filter to their heart's content, Apple understands the App Store climate better than anyone else possibly can. As such, their advice is probably golden. Which is okay if you're a relatively nimble, single-purpose company, and you can afford to risk restructuring everything you do around their store, and your costs can be covered at whatever price you evidently need to set to sell at a certain volume. But you'll just want to keep in mind that their advice is self-interested. Apple wants cheap apps, to keep people buying them, and to keep other stores firmly in the second tier—and they're not afraid to say it. From Apple's last quarterly report to investors, a line they've been echoing since the store opened:

[Apple] also expects competition to intensify as competitors attempt to imitate the Company's approach to providing [digital app distribution] seamlessly within their individual offerings or work collaboratively to offer integrated solutions...While the Company is widely recognized as a leading innovator in the personal computer and consumer electronics markets as well as a leader in the emerging market for distribution of third-party digital content and applications, these markets are highly competitive and subject to aggressive pricing.

You don't need to look back any further than the launch of the iTunes music store to see an Apple that will do everything it can to push other peoples' prices down for their benefit. Of course, they can't really fix prices for apps—they're not songs or movies, and each one does something different—but they can nudge like hell.

What Happens Now

So what does the App Store Effect mean, right now? In the short term, we'll get lower prices. This is great. But in the long term, it might not be sustainable.

The promise that sales volume will make up for the rock-bottom prices you need to charge just to be seen in your app category seems increasingly hollow, and to put it bluntly, if developers don't have a chance in hell of recouping their fees, they'll stop trying. And I'm not talking about 99-cent iFart app spammers here—I'm talking about big players who already make money selling software. If the navigation companies, the big game studios and the premium content providers can't thrive in the App Store, they'll have to leave; even playing in Apple's sandbox threatens and undercut their (sometimes much more crucial) product lines elsewhere.

And don't forget, Palm and Android fans, this App Store Effect sends ripples well beyond the App Store. Customers expect to see functionally identical apps priced the same way across platforms, because to us, that's what makes sense. Can devs really afford to port an app to the webOS to sell to the tens of thousands of Pre owners, when they're expected to tag it with iPhone prices, calculated for a base of millions? Whether by Apple's design or totally by accident, everyone who doesn't own an iPhone will suffer for it.

The App Store Effect illustrates a new kind of economy, and it's not going to go away. In fact, it's going to get worse. Developers will either adapt, die or leave. But where will they go? Until there are 50 million Android handsets and 50 million Pre offspring out there, the rest of the mobile software world is pretty much screwed.

I spoke with Brian McKinney, who runs Chocolate Lab Records, a smallish label out of Chicago. As someone who actually makes records, he saw potential in iTunes LP, and after seeing how incredibly simple the actual LP files are, started looking into making some himself. It didn't go so well:

I contacted the digital distribution manager at my label's distributor. He had a conference call with an iTunes rep and asked how we go about putting an LP together. He was told that LPs aren't being offered to indies and that there are only about 12 LPs being offered right now. They also said that iTunes charges a $10,000 production fee for them as well. So that pretty much edges out the indie market completely.

Deflecting criticism that it's just another way to squeeze a few extra dollars out of customers, Apple pitches iTunes LP as a way to bring back "the visual experience of the record album" (Which they helped kill in the first place. Penance, or something!)

But if they're charging ridiculous, prohibitive fees and only letting a few major labels take advantage of this—you know, the ones that iTunes needs to keep happy to be a viable music store, not the ones that might actually make something artistically interesting with LP—that romantic cry for the return of the album (it's more like the return of the Digipak, anyway) sounds a cynical and disingenuous. More to the point, it'll forever doom LP to gimmickry, because, well, the Dave Matthews Band can only carry you so far. —Thanks, Brian!

Update: Apple just gave us this comment, which seemingly contradicts some of what was said above:

We're releasing the open specs for iTunes LP soon, allowing both major and indie labels to create their own. There is no production fee charged by Apple.

So, with the open specs in place it seems like indie labels (or any other label) will be able to create iTunes LPs as much as they want, and not at a mandatory $10k a pop.

To put this into context, doubleTwist debuted not just as an alternative music manager for people with or without Apple players, but as a giant, coded jab at iTunes, Apple, and the way they do business. After launch, DVD Jon, who created doubleTwist, spent a few months waging a small-scale PR war, hanging Apple-baiting banners in San Francisco and parodying their famous "1984" ad. With Amazon MP3 store integration, that ad's promise—to "bring you choice"—has come true, and it's worth a thousand PR stunts

As has been the case with every other aspect of doubleTwist, the music storefront looks like a simpler version of the one in iTunes. Navigation and searching are about as simple as they could be, as are downloads, which only take a few clicks. The whole experience will be familiar to anyone weened on Apple's bloated beast, apart from a few things: Amazon's album prices are often lower than iTunes', and of course, you can immediately sync any music you download—there's only music, by the way—to practically any device you own, be it a Pre, a BlackBerry, a Sandisk, an iPod, or whatever.

The first version is Mac-only and tied to Amazon's US store, but Windows (and international) versions are on their way. [doubleTwist via Techcrunch]

The feature, which lets users designate any or all of their content to be available offline, is only available to the £9.99/month or £120/year premium subscribers, but effectively hands them unlimited music, available at all times, for a flat fee. The mobile app is still the showstopper here—we've seen a few all-you-can-eat DRM music services before—but, you know, still, insult to injury. Our only consolation? Spotify thinks they can launch in the US before the end of the year, though I'll be eager to see if they can get as cozy a licensing deal as they found in the UK. [Techcrunch]

Apple's App Store Downloads Top Two Billion

More Than 85,000 Apps Now Available for iPhone & iPod touch

CUPERTINO, Calif., Sept. 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today announced that more than two billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store, the largest applications store in the world. There are now more than 85,000 apps available to the more than 50 million iPhone(TM) and iPod touch® customers worldwide and over 125,000 developers in Apple's iPhone Developer Program.

"The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "The App Store has reinvented what you can do with a mobile handheld device, and our users are clearly loving it."

Today, iPhone and iPod touch customers in 77 countries worldwide can choose from an incredible range of apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel. With the recently introduced iTunes® 9, it's now easier than ever to organize and sync your apps right in iTunes and they will automatically appear on your iPhone or iPod touch with the same layout.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

A tipster fed PreCentral a compelling theory about a prospective delay in the App Catalog upgrade and associated WebOS software update, the day before they were set to launch. And lo, launch they did not. Credence, lent!:

webOS 1.2 (and possibly paid apps in the App Catalog) could be delayed (again) until next week. The delay comes from Sprint's need to test the changes made since that first webOS 1.2 leak, including all the changes surrounding the App Catalog. The results will be that webOS 1.2 will be released as webOS 1.2.1. Oh, and though it's not the source of the delay, webOS 1.2.1 should re-enable iTunes sync.

In lieu of an official explanation, this is probably what happened: nothing catastrophic, but unfortunate nonetheless.

Their tipster also provided some insight into Palm's part in the bizarre iTunes compatibility fray. Apparently, cracking iTunes to allow the Pre to sync is extremely easy, and Apple's countermeasures can be circumvented almost instantly—reenabling syncing after the second to last forced compatibility break took developers about five minutes, while the fiddling it took to fix iTunes 9 syncing in the forthcoming 1.2.1 update can be measured in hours, on one hand, on two fingers. Which is disappointing, since I always imagined some kind of Cold-War-style coding race between the two companies, where success is measured in MP3 transfers and human blood. Life is boring. [PreCentral]

First, you should be safe in continuing to use iTunes as your music organization library. You'll still be able to sync your playlists onto your Pre using one of the apps we detailed here. It's not guaranteed that direct iTunes sync will break in the future, since Palm might still be able to find some kind of workaround; but even if they don't, you have multiple ways of doing it yourself. If you want to be safe, you could just switch over to one of these other library management solutions now, and not have to worry about iTunes anymore. [Gizmodo]

Palm whined to the USB-IF about how Apple was blocking them every time they tried to circumvent their vendor ID-based anti-non-iPod-devices system. Here's part of the USB-IF reply:

Palm may only use the single Vendor ID issued to Palm for Palm's usage….Usage of another company's Vendor ID is specifically precluded.

Basically, what Palm is doing is against the rules of USB, and Palm should stop doing it. What is more, the USB-IF says that Apple has all the right to do what they are doing, since it's not agains the rules:

Palm's allegation (if true) does not establish that Apple is using its Vendor ID contrary to USB-IF's policies.

Palm told Business Week that they are going to reply to the USB Implementers Forum because they believe the users have the right to use whatever device they want to use their non-rights managed media. They are right, especially when Apple has an almost-monopolistic position on the software music player market, and they are trying to get a hold of it by limiting access to their own devices. However, maybe they should take the matter to the FTC instead of going against the rules. [Business Week]

•Resolves issues browsing the iTunes Store.
•Addresses a performance issue where iTunes may become unresponsive.
•Fixes a problem where iTunes may unexpectedly quit.
•Fixes a problem syncing Podcasts in playlists to iPod or iPhone.
•Fixes a problem sorting albums with multiple discs.
•Addresses an issue with the Zoom button not switching to Mini Player.
•Improves application syncing for iPod touch and iPhone.
•Genius is now automatically updated to show Genius Mixes.

Nothing major here, but it is definitely worth upgrading. [iTunes via Lifehacker]

Instead of making users learn the ins and outs of FTP, Netgear has set up a graphic-driven MyStora.com through which the drive can be accessed. So the effect is like a NAS light that the less tech inclined might enjoy. (If your parents or parents' parents can handle email, chances are they can handle this NAS.)

There's also some premium service Netgear offers that involves mobile phones and flickr for $20/year.

Luckily the NAS isn't gimpled, supporting Macs/PCs/Linuxes and DLNA/UPnP/iTunes media sharing. But there is one pretty big catch. It seems the Stora's expansion is limited exclusively to mirroring, meaning that you can't add a second drive to double capacity. And that sorta kills the fun, doesn't it? [Stora]

NETGEAR's Stora Brings Easy-to-Use, Internet-connected Storage to Consumers Everywhere

New Storage Device with Remote Access Enables Home Users to Share Photos with Friends without Uploading to Internet Sites

SAN JOSE, Calif. - September 21, 2009 - NETGEAR, Inc. (NASDAQGM: NTGR), a worldwide provider of technologically innovative, branded networking solutions, and network storage leader in the business and prosumer market with its ReadyNAS line, today announced NETGEAR Stora, a new, easy-to-use network attached storage (NAS) device for home media. Stora enables consumers to easily centralize photos, music, movies and files and use them on nearly any network device. With a smooth user interface designed for non-technical users, Stora lets consumers easily share their photos and videos with friends without the time-consuming process of uploading them to Internet sites or transferring them over email. Through an intuitive and graphical user interface on www.MyStora.com, users and their designated friends and relatives can remotely access their media files from any Internet-connected device, such as laptops, PCs and smartphones.

"We strongly feel that Stora exemplifies the next-generation of consumer storage devices," said Drew Meyer, director of marketing for NETGEAR's Network Storage Business Unit. "NETGEAR has already made its mark in the business and prosumer market with our ReadyNAS line, but Stora is most definitely a platform for everyone. Stora gives users the features they need today with a consumer-friendly user interface and price point, making their media available to them and their designated friends and families anytime, anywhere — even on mobile smartphones. It truly sets a new bar for the consumer network storage market."

Store: Compatible with Mac, PC and Linux systems, NETGEAR's Stora puts music, movies, photos, and files at the heart of the home network, centralized in a single, safe location.

Share: With remote access via www.MyStora.com, Stora enables cross-platform file sharing, music listening, movie watching and photo sharing from any Internet-connected device. In addition to sharing files over the web, users can also share photos, videos and files between home computers and home media players. Stora can centralize music collections and play music through iTunes. It can also automatically integrate content with remote photo frames and social networking sites such as Facebook. Stora can also serve content to other networked devices such as Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA)-enabled photo frames, XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 game consoles, and iPhone and Blackberry mobile phones.

Protect: With two standard drive bays that automatically mirror data, Stora offers plug-and-play protection that safeguards valuable data. Users can simply add a second drive, on the fly, without any tools. Stora also comes with automatic backup utilities for PCs and Macs, so individual system content is backed up regularly.

"Today's consumers face a conundrum when trying to manage newly acquired or created digital content among various computing devices inside and outside the home," said David Reinsel, group vice president of IDC's storage and semiconductor research groups. "Historically, personal storage devices have proven competent at providing reliable storage capacity and data protection within the home, but not always accessible from outside the home or across multiple devices. With this new product, NETGEAR looks to solve these common problems for consumers."

NETGEAR Stora (MS2110) comes with a 1 TB disk and one extra drive bay that can be used to insert an optional disk for mirroring. The product is immediately available through selected North American retail and e-commerce stores. Stora will be available from leading European and Asia Pacific retail locations in approximately two weeks. Stora is backed by a three-year warranty and 24/7 technical support and the Stora (MS2110) model has an MSRP in the U.S. of $229. An optional yearly premium service, to support additional remote access and third-party service integration such as Flickr and mobile phones, is available for $19.99 after an initial 30-day trial period.

First off, some reasons to take this road: iTunes is a decent audio encoder, and it'll get your music from point A—the CD—to points B, C and D—your computer, your MP3 player and your backup drive—without much trouble. But it'll do it with a less-than-great encoder, with occasionally inconsistent tagging, with album art that'll only work on Apple devices, and without support for the best lossless audio formats and MP3 encoding options, which you probably want, whether you know it or not.

In short, the ripping process deserves a little more care than iTunes or Windows Media player can give it. You can pay people for this, which feels dumb and wasteful, or you can do it yourself. It's not difficult, at all. Here's what you do:

Get Your Software

The first step to ditching iTunes is to, well, ditch iTunes. What we're looking for is ripping software that offers more encoding options than iTunes, but more importantly, a better encoder. And as far as MP3 encoders go, the open source LAME is as good as they get. There's plenty of software for both Mac and PC that leverages this encoder, but here are two programs that do lots, lots more.

Mac OS X: Max
From the makers:

When extracting audio from compact discs, Max offers the maximum in flexibility to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully extracted. For pristine discs, Max offers a high-speed ripper with no error correction. For damaged discs, Max can either use its built-in comparison ripper (for drives that cache audio) or the error-correcting power of cdparanoia.

What this translates to: Great error reduction, fantastic sound quality, and tons and tons of encoding options—not that you really need those to do a good rip, but hey, they can't hurt. On top of all this, Max is also a great file converter, in case you've got some delinquent WMA files scattered around.

Windows: Exact Audio Copy
From the makers:

Exact Audio Copy is a so called audio grabber for audio CDs using standard CD and DVD-ROM drives. The main differences between EAC and most other audio grabbers are
• It is free (for non-commercial purposes)
• It works with a technology, which reads audio CDs almost perfectly. If there are any errors that can't be corrected, it will tell you on which time position the (possible) distortion occurred, so you could easily control it with e.g. the media player

What this translates to: The best error correction money can buy, for free. Seriously: Audiophiles swear by exact audio copy, and with good reason. You'll have to download your own LAME encoder before you can enable MP3 encoding in the program options, but you can do that right here without a problem. Additionally, setting up tagging, which you'll definitely want to do, takes an extra, albeit easy, step.

If you want to take a simpler route you can just download CDex, which supports LAME and tagging databases out of the box, and produces results nearly as good as—if not as good as—Exact Audio Copy.

On both platforms, you're going to have a lot of personal decisions to make. How do you want to organize your files? How do you want to name them? Unlike iTunes, these apps don't pressure your to store your music in a certain way—it's up to you to archive as you please. Both offer plenty of options for storage and organization, easily available in their Preferences menus:
As I said, this one's up to you.

Choose Your File Type

MP3: If you're encoding only for portable devices, not concerned about archiving perfect copies of your music, hate hate hate audiophiles, think FLAC and OGG just sound like gurgling baby noises, you're probably going to want to stick with MP3s. Yes, there are other formats that offer a better size-to-sound ratio, and no, it's not open source or anything, but for pure compatibility, control, and encoder choice, it's hard—-no, impossible—to beat MP3. And if you set up your encoder correctly, MP3s can sound great.

It's tough to pick the optimal MP3 bitrate on your own, since at a certain point, differences in sound quality seem to come down as much to psychological factors as to actual clarity. Thankfully, we've crowd-sourced this issue and come up with a rough guide: 256kbps is, it seems, where people just can't really tell the difference. In practical terms, this means setting your encoder to these settings:

That's no higher than 256kbps VBR—for variable bitrate, which modifies the amount of information in your file's stream according to how much is needed, and saves you space without sacrificing quality—with the highest (read: slowest) available encoding option. For almost everyone, in almost all circumstances, this'll do, and it sure beats iTunes default 160kbps constant bitrate rips.

FLAC: If archiving is your intention—as in, digitizing your music without losing any quality, no matter how imperceptible—then you're going to want to go lossless. And of the lossless formats, FLAC is the most well-supported in terms of software and hardware, albeit not on any of Apple's products—though iTunes can be made to play nice with FLAC with a few simple tweaks.

But don't fret! The beauty of FLAC music is that it can be converted to other lossless formats, like Apple's iPod-compatible Apple Lossless, without losing any quality, or compressed into MP3s without having to worry about muddy transcoding. Think of them as CDs without the physical disc, basically.

Embed Your Album Art

On Mac OS, assuming you're doing your listening in iTunes, which is pretty handy at fetching album art, you can just use one of Doug's famous iTunes scripts to write said album art directly to your MP3 files. Here's how you install it:

To install the files/folders, drag the items in the disc image window to your [username]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder. If there is no folder named "Scripts" there, create one and drag the files into it. AppleScripts placed in this folder will be listed in the iTunes Script menu. You do not have to install the .rtf/.rtfd documentation file in the "Scripts" folder, but it's as convenient a place as any.

For Windows users, Lifehacker's written a fantastic guide to collecting and embedding album art, which you should definitely read. The short version? Download MediaMonkey, and let it do the work for you.

Granted, once you embed album art into your files, apps like iTunes and Windows Media Player might not display it, and may ask you to search for it from their databases. This is fine: Both programs use proprietary album art storage systems, so just because they can't see your ID3 tag album art doesn't mean it's not there, or that you shouldn't have embedded it—having it around can't hurt, and it's by far the most compatible and rational method for storing album art, as far as other software, most MP3 players and long-term storage go.

Anyway, that's it! Now you can set your CDs aside comfortably, knowing that you've squeezed the purest, most delicious audio files you can out of them. Now:

Listen to Your Music

Because that was the whole point.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you'd like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy ripping, folks!

Good news, sourpusses! Now you can change it back, with this unofficial patch. (OS X only for now). [Chao's Design—Thanks, Blake!]

You can actually dive right in yourself by changing the .ITLP extension to .ZIP, giving you full access to the files inside. What's interesting is that it does all of the animation using HTML 4.01, CSS and JavaScript—no Flash. Also "missing" is DRM—your iTunes account is just recorded inside the file.

Oh, and probably the best tip? Check out the custom visualizers inside of each album, they're great. Lots more tidbits, like accidental leftover files, here: [Jay Robinson via DF]

7:12 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Man it's early. About 3 hours left to go. More expect more updates from now until then, as usual.

7:20 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Schiller NEEDS to do today's presentation with the I am T-Pain app.

7:53 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Sitting on public transportation is a lot like sitting on the toilet. Reading makes the time go by faster, but eventually you're going to get hit in the face with the smell of urine. If you're lucky it'll just be the smell.

7:57 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
What does everyone think about the Palm Pixi? I like it. Even if it's slightly less powerful than the Pre, the size and the better keyboard make up for the losses, somewhat.

8:01 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
If Apple's inevitable tablet has ebook reading functionality I will personally shake the hand of everyone who worked on that team. Having to switch back and forth between reading a book on the kindle and reading a website on a laptop makes me feel like I'm getting a workout, sure, but if I wanted to exercise I wouldn't have thrown out all those 24 hour fitness fliers.

8:09 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Oh and I probably wouldn't personally shake their hands–I'd send an intern to do it. Gotta watch out for that piggy flu.

8:14 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
I'm wondering what "rock" songs will be playing before the event starts today, seeing as it's a "rock" theme. Rock Lobster? Schoolhouse Rock? Rachmaninoff?

8:18 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
I think sitting down on a train while someone is standing right in front of you is one of the few times where you can stare intently into a person's crotch without other people hassling you about it.

8:18 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

8:20 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:
OH HELLO! Good morning. Dan Nosowitz, Apple liveblog virgin, and I are at the Yerba Buena center downtown. Nothing starts for 1 hour and 40 minutes but we thought we'd get here early.

8:21 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Nice of you to qualify that last statement with "Apple liveblog."

8:22 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Dan Nosowitz:
There's someone pointing a video camera at me right now. Little does he know I'm just catching up on last night's celebrity gossip.

8:23 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:
Just waiting for Jason to get here. Wonder how traffic is coming from the east bay…probably bad, as usual.

8:30 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:
Everyone's talking about iPods but I think it makes sense to see new iTunes today, too. I mean, that's no revelation but I did notice when reviewing snow leopard that iTunes was not rewritten in 64-bits. One of the few apps still native to os x in 32 bits.

8:33 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Dan Nosowitz:
Everyone thinks Apple's going to add a camera onto the Nano and Touch but, especially for the Nano, I think it's kind of a dumb idea. Maybe it's just me but I don't need another crappy camera in my life.

8:40 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:
Hey Guys, turning off the live blog poll for for now. I'll let you know when its back on, so you can vote on the news. You can do it by clicking on the love/hate buttons, as many times as you want–it'll count each vote and chart it with the rest of the votes from other readers–or hit H or L keys while focused on the flash widget. But that's later. Oh, also, I forgot what the event is called "Only Rock and Roll", not Let's Rock. I get these damn events confused now.

8:41 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Dan Nosowitz:
I'd love to see a major iTunes refresh. Maybe we could finally get a "play next" function, like Winamp's had since about the last Ice Age.

8:49 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Dan Nosowitz:
On Apple event mornings I like to try to guess which indie band Apple's going to feature. My bet/hope for today: Discovery. You know, just indie enough to be hip but not so much they'll be scary to old folks.

8:50 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
There's a crew of 20 old people with swords around the corner.

8:53 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

its cold but sunny. The crowd is dressed in suits, generally.

8:54 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Dan Nosowitz:
Brian and I are liveblogging in sunglasses, because 1) we're cool rebels and 2) the sun hurts our frail blogger eyes.

8:58 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
That treadmill shelf for laptops really works. I walked three blocks and was not winded.

9:01 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Someone asked me if there are going to be any surprises. I think it's going to be Grey's Anatomy in space. (The seven of you who got that joke are high fiving yourselves now.)

9:02 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Dan Nosowitz:
My press pass says "9.09.09″ but if I look down at it it looks like "06.06.6," THE MARK OF THE BEAST. What are you trying to tell me, Apple?

9:13 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
The usual people are here–analysts, media and other people who I don't recognize. Bald count stands at about 8.

9:13 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Dan Nosowitz:

9:15 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Dan Nosowitz:
Catering update: Apple's spread of fruits and breads is totally pedestrian. Does this have an implication for the event to come? Discuss. At length.

9:16 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Wilson Rothman:

9:17 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
40 minutes left. Greg Grunberg is here, and I hope I spelled his name right. Nice guy, and looks exactly like he does on TV. It's like the makeup department said "meh" and moved on.

9:20 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Dan Nosowitz:
Every time I see the tagline "It's Only Rock and Roll" I start humming Billy Joel's "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me." Please tell me I'm not the only one.

9:20 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
I don't know why, but someone is eating a banana and it is hilarious to me.

9:22 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
There is a 13-year-old boy here. I hope for his sale he doesn't do like I did when I was 13 and get inappropriate erections.

9:22 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Wilson Rothman:

9:26 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Think about the person in your life that doesn't have an iPod already. Think about the last time he or she offered to pay for dinner. YOU CAN'T CAN YOU?!

9:27 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Wilson Rothman:

9:30 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Oh and if you want to follow us on Twitter, our names are on the masthead on the main Gizmodo.com page. And mine is @diskopo .

9:32 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Dan Nosowitz:
I want to display my Zune in a prominent place so everyone knows my commitment to objective journalism (and to buying shit on Woot).

9:34 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Wilson Rothman:

9:35 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
What are your 3 predictions for announcements today? Mine are iPods, iPods and more iPods. But also a new version of iTunes that forces your musical tastes upon Twitter and facebook.

9:40 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Wilson Rothman:

9:47 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Wilson Rothman:

9:48 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

9:49 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
We're inside. People are scrambling for seats, and I'm hungry.

9:50 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Dan Nosowitz:
First three songs: Aerosmith's "Walk This Way," The Who's "Baba O'Reilly" and Green Day's "When I Come Around." Didn't Apple used to be cool?

9:51 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Thanks to the guys at Hypermac for their awesome external batteries. Saves us a lot of battery switching/worrying.

9:53 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Eight minutes left. Put your phones on vibrate and tell your coworkers you're going to be in a meeting.

9:54 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Eric Schmidt is here, despite having been kicked off the Apple board. It's like attending your old high school's prom after you were expelled for vandalism and sent to the other high school under the bridge.

9:55 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Definitely "rock" songs playing today. No Coldplay or John Mayer. The rift between Mayer and Apple has never been bigger. Please, someone just apologize already.

9:56 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Dan Nosowitz:
I guess they're doing different decades with the music, since Hendrix is playing now. Super boring stuff though. If Steve wants to borrow my Zune I can show him some good tunes.

9:57 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:
Hey, I'm having some image difficulty, but we'll be back in a minute, before things start.

9:58 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Nevermind, that was just a bad transition. Another song's up now.

10:00 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
The Stones are playing.

10:01 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:01 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
The lights are dimming, and something is happening soon. Get ready.

10:02 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Steve Jobs is on stage and is getting a standing ovation.

10:02 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:02 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Applause, applause, sustained applause.

10:03 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
"I'm very happy to be here with you all. As some of you might know, I had a liver transplant." He said he now has the liver of a 20 year old who died in a car crash, and he thanks him for his generosity.

10:03 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Steve also wants to thank everyone in the Apple community for the "heartfelt support", and thank Tim Cook and all the other execs at Apple.

10:04 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Steve's voice seems a little bit softer than we remember, a little bit of a hoarse whisper, but all in all he seems able-bodied (if still skinny).

10:05 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
He's going to have Phil Schiller join him for part of the presentation. In 2+ years, Apple's sold 30 million iPhones.

10:05 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
"One of the reasons for that is the remarkable app store." They have more than 75,000 apps, and users have downloaded 1.8 billion apps. That does not include updates (obviously).

10:06 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
"Today we have something new for iPhone and iPod Touch owners." It's iPhone 3.1.

10:06 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Now, Genius makes application suggestions based on the apps you own in order–just like Genius for iTunes music.

10:09 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
The second thing is ringtones to the iTunes store. They have 30,000 ringtones from the majors, and will be $1.29.

10:09 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:09 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
iTunes is the number one music retailer in the world. They've sold 8.5 billion songs, and there are 100 million accounts in iTunes. This leads up to iTunes 9.

10:10 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Something else new: Genius mixes–Genius applied to another area. 54 billion songs submitted and analyzed since the Genius feature launched.

10:10 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:11 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Genius mixes is a Genius DJ playing songs from your library that it thinks will go well together. iTunes will make 12 by default, and all you have to do is click on one and it'll start playing indefinitely.

10:12 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Also new: improved syncing. So when you sync now you can sync these playlists, but you can now also select genres or artists directly from the Music sync tab.

10:12 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:12 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
This applies to Photos as well, selecting Events, people as well as albums that you've already set up.

10:13 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Or movies, syncing the most recent movies or something, and always having one movie.

10:13 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
What's even better is better app syncing for the iPhone, allowing you to manage pages and app locations on iTunes directly.

10:13 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
New "home sharing" in iTunes lets you copy songs, movies and TV shows among the 5 authorized computers in your house.

10:13 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:14 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Now you can drag songs from other libraries into YOUR library and it will copy it.

10:15 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Also, a redesigned iTunes store that's better looking (but not all that different from what you've seen before). It's "cleaner", says Steve, but it doesn't seem like a huge jump.

10:15 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Lastly, iTunes LP.

10:16 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
For iTunes LP, it'll include videos, liner notes, credits and other customized content that you used to get when you bought LPs in the past, except now it's digital.

10:16 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:17 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
And now, Jeff Robin comes up for a demo of iTunes 9.

10:18 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
First he's going to show App Organization (the rearranging of your apps on iTunes). Click on Applications and you'll get all the apps and pages. You can click and drag apps from one page to another, or deselect apps from the left hand side and not sync them. You can also drag multiple items at once.

10:18 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:18 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:23 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
First he's going to show App Organization (the rearranging of your apps on iTunes). Click on Applications and you'll get all the apps and pages. You can click and drag apps from one page to another, or deselect apps from the left hand side and not sync them. You can also drag multiple items at once.

10:23 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Double-clicking an app on the left-hand side will take you directly to the page that it's on. There's search (type in the name and it'll show the app), and page rearranging, meaning you can move whole pages up or down the queue.

10:23 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Next, home sharing. You can view other people's libraries, as you can now, and just select and drag songs to your library. It'll disappear from the list of other people's libraries if you select to only show "items not in my library."

He's demoing the iTunes store now, and all pages have been redesigned to match the new style. There are also quick-view popups for albums, allowing you to see the entire album from wherever you are, instead of having to go into the album page.

Oh and Facebook/Twitter sharing: you can now click on content and share links directly to them from the store.

10:24 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
As for iTunes LP, you can flip through photos and individual songs, which displays lyrics directly in iTunes for you to Karaoke along with.

10:26 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
There can also be custom interviews (in video) that comes with the iTunes LP purchases.

10:26 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:26 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:26 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
There are iTunes Extras for movies as well, giving you extra features (think DVD extras) but more interactive. And different.

10:27 AM ON Sep 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:27 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
iTunes demo over. Steve Jobs is coming back on stage.

10:27 AM ON Sep 9 2009
Jason Chen:
iTunes 9 is available today.

10:28 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Now, the iPod. Phil Schiller is coming up and taking over.

10:28 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:28 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Apple's sold 225 million iPods to date.

10:28 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
I think our server troubles are over? Let's hope!

10:29 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
As for Marketshare, iPod's got 73.8%, Sandisk has 7.2%, and Microsoft has around 1%. The rest is "other".

10:29 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:29 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
The fastest growing iPod is the iPod Touch.

10:30 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:30 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Apple's sold 20 million iPod touches. Add that to the iPhone number and you'll get a big number of devices that can run your apps.

10:30 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:
Hey, we disabled the poll. Looks like you guys really liked clicking on it. Caused some problems with the servers.

10:31 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Phil is going over the talking points of the iPod Touch; the same things you already know. It runs apps, playing music and watching video.

10:32 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:32 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
You can also use Genius Mixes (the feature introduced in iTunes 9) on the iPod Touch, with the songs you've already loaded onto there.

10:33 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:33 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Phil, the consummate salesman, is going through the features of the iPod Touch as if it hasn't been available for 2 years now.

10:33 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:34 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
"Not everybody's computer fits in your pocket", Phil says, as he points to a photo of a dude shoving a Dell laptop into his ass pocket.

10:35 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:35 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Phil is comparing games on the PSP to the DS, saying they have no multitouch and that they're expensive. You even have to GO TO A STORE TO BUY A GAME. Nobody ever says Phil doesn't have the balls to say things like this on stage with a straight face.

10:36 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:36 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:36 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Here's an image of the comparison between the amount of iPhone games vs. the amount of PSP and DS games. Misleading graph if anything, seeing as the amount of games doesn't indicate that they are all GOOD games.

10:37 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:37 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
And now a montage of games from various iPod Touch Action Titles.

10:38 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Phil's inviting up Ubisoft to demo Assassin's Creed. It's NOT Jade Raymond, unfortunately.

10:39 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Assassin's Creed 2 is being demoed now. It's a sidescrolling game, and has some pretty decent graphics.

10:39 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:39 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
You can even put your face into the wanted posters with the camera. Does this mean that the iPod Touch is getting a camera??

10:39 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:40 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Ubisoft is releasing this app on the same day as the Assassin's Creed game for consoles.

10:40 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Ubisoft is releasing this app on the same day as the Assassin's Creed game for consoles.

10:40 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:41 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Their latest game mixes music and racing.

10:41 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Next up, Tapulous, which makes Tap Tap Revenge.

10:42 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:43 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Riddim Ribbon is their latest game, making you a "DJ". You're "racing" down a track by tilting the phone, and you can choose different remixes of the current song you're on. You can flick the phone up to jump and add custom sounds. The guy playing the game is really into it.

10:43 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
After you're done playing the game you'll have made your own "mix" of the song, which you can share.

10:43 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:44 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Next is Gameloft. They're shipping 35 gaming titles in the App Store right now, with 20 million downloads.

10:44 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:44 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Nova, a first person shooter, puts you into the shoes of a space marine. SPACE MARINE, how come nobody's come up with this before?

10:45 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
The HUD looks a lot like Halo, and it feels quite a bit like Halo.

10:45 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:45 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:45 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
You use the left side of the screen for the analog stick, and the right side to shoot. Plus the middle for changing weapons.

10:46 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
There will be multiplayer over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

10:46 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Last is EA.

10:47 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:47 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Here's a game that's been around "for over 20 years." It's Madden, which has been announced already, and looks like PlayStation 1 graphics.

10:48 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:48 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:49 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
The analog stick controls motion, just like the normal Madden, and John Madden gives super obvious advice, again, just like the normal Madden.

10:49 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
"Usually the team that makes the least mistakes will win the game," declares Madden.

10:49 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Need For Speed Shift, Command and Conquer and NBA Live are also coming to the App Store.

10:50 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Phil says the iPod Touch is the "most affordable gateway to the App Store," which is true.

10:51 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Phil says "$199 is a magic price point in the iPod market." So, they're lowering the iPod Touch price to $199 for the 8GB version.

10:52 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
The 32GB will be $299 and 64GB will be $399.

10:52 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:52 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Also, the $299 and $399 versions of the iPod Touch will be 50% faster, and run OpenGL ES 2.0–the same as the iPhone 3GS.

10:53 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:53 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
So, the 8GB version is running the older processor and the 32 and 64GB are running the newer one.

10:54 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
There's an iPod Touch ad showing off multiplayer by having multiple people play at the same time, showing off interactions.

10:54 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:54 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Next up is the iPod Classic. Today, there's a 120GB version for $249. They're going to raise the size to 160GB for the same $249.

10:54 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B.Lam:

10:54 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Then, the iPod Shuffle.

10:55 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:55 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:55 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Customers wanted to "expand" the range of headphones that work for the iPod Shuffle, which include Beats by Dre.

10:56 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:57 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:57 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
What's new? New colors that's what. Black, silver, pink, green and blue. A lower price of $59 for 2GB, in addition to the $79 at 4GB.

10:57 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
All these ship today.

10:57 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
There's also a $99 special 4GB model made of polished steel. Special Edition.

10:57 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
And here's Steve again.

10:57 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:58 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
One more thing…

10:58 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
A video camera?

10:58 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:58 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
My guess is a camera on the iPod Touch. But we'll see in a second.

10:59 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:59 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
He's comparing a Flip at $149 with 4GB of memory. "So what are we gonna do?" They're going to use an 8GB model, and it will be "free". Yep, it's going to be on the iPod Nano. There's a camera and a microphone.

10:59 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

10:59 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
There will be a speaker as well, for playback.

11:00 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

11:00 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

11:01 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
"So how good is it?" Steve shows a demo video shot with the Nano.

11:01 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
He's making us watch the same lame video twice.

11:01 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

11:02 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

11:02 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Apple's sold 100 million iPod nanos to make it the "most popular music player in the world." They're adding voiceover, a genius mix feature, and FM radio.

11:03 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Also, a pedometer and a voice recorder. You can sync the pedometer directly to Nike+ as well, to keep track of your steps.

11:03 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam

11:03 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

11:03 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
And, new colors. "We've finally figured out how to do colors that are unimaginably beautiful. They're polished anodized aluminum."

11:03 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
There are two models. 8GB for $149 and 16GB for $179. They're available today.

11:04 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

11:04 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Here's an ad for it.

11:04 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
We're turning off live refresh, so you'll have to click refresh to get new updates. Please, refresh!

11:05 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

11:05 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

11:05 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Now the obligatory Environmental Checklist. Arsenic, BFR, Mercury, PVC-free.

11:06 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
That's not it, Steve has some more to say.

11:06 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
"Like you, we love music. There's no better way to remind us all than to have a live performance. We are really lucky today that Norah Jones is joining us." Norah Jones yay!

11:06 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

11:07 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Norah Jones is coming up on stage, and she looks Norah Jonesey. Very nice.

11:07 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

11:08 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

11:08 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Not only is she a great singer, she was good in the Wong Kar Wai movie as well. The movie itself wasn't all that fantastic, but SHE was good in it.

11:09 AM ON SEP 9 2009
B. Lam:

11:10 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
My knee hurts like a mofo from sitting so long. I am officially an old man.

11:11 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Here's a new song that they're going to release this November.

11:13 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Here's a new song that they're going to release this November.

11:14 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
So to recap, no real new "designs" in any of the iPods, but there are some lower prices and new features. No camera for the iPod Touch, but there is one for the Nano.

11:14 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Steve Jobs is coming back on stage to thank Norah Jones.

11:15 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
I feel like he's gonna say "Goodnight everybody, stay tuned for Craig Ferguson."

11:16 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Steve thanks everyone for coming, and Brian, Dan and I thank you all for reading!

11:16 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
You guys really loved pushing that button so much that it crashed our machines, so we'll make sure to put more button-handling in there for next time. October, maybe? There's always the tablet.

11:17 AM ON SEP 9 2009
Jason Chen:
Time to get some hands-on with the new iPods. See you all soon on the main Gizmodo page. BYE!

• iTunes 9: Everything You Need To Know

• iPod Nano 5th Gen Review

• More on new iPod Nano: Full Story, Hands On and First Video Samples

• iPod Touch Update--and What It Is Missing (Spoiler: A Camera)

• New Colors, Sizes for iPod Shuffle and Classic

• The Best Surprise of All: Steve Jobs' return to the stage; here's the video

Missing anything? Here's the full coverage of Apple's Only Rock and Roll event.

If Apple really wants to recreate that "feel" of buying a record, I have to feel like I'm buying something that isn't just higher quality, but also permanent. If I buy a lossy AAC file from the iTunes store today, not only do I know that it's inferior to the same $15 CD, but also that I'll have to chuck it once AAC is put out to pasture.

Together with all of the liner notes, lyric books and photos, lossless files could perfectly replace CDs (assuming they're properly backed up). In the future, if needed, I could transcode these lossless downloads into any lossy compression format that comes along. Apple Lossless in the iTunes Store would offer all the convenience of digital downloads along with the permanency of CD quality audio. If it ever happened, I would never need to buy a CD again.

Unfortunately, that last part is exactly why lossless audio isn't included as part of the iTunes LP package. The labels know that once they give customers lossless audio in online music stores, they'll have reached the point of no return. As popular as iTunes may be, CD sales still make up the majority of music purchases. The record companies are understandably scared to let go of their last strong foothold in the industry and give Apple even more leverage.

As a result, I don't think it's Apple's fault that lossless audio isn't available in the iTunes store. The iTunes Producer software labels use to create files for download on iTunes has supposedly had an option to encode in Apple Lossless since 2006. Apple would probably love to offer lossless files at a premium, just like they originally did with iTunes Plus. But then record companies would probably want that content triple-wrapped in DRM. Until the record companies stop making money off of the CD, we won't see a big move to lossless.

CD quality lossless audio would just be the beginning. Really, the ultimate archival format would be 24-bit, 96KHz tracks, maybe even 192KHz someday. That might sound crazy, but it's out there. HDTracks has Alison Krauss and Robert Plant's album Raising Sand available in DRM-free, 24-bit, 96KHz FLAC files. The price? $16, one dollar less than some iTunes LPs that include 256Kbps AAC files. Obviously, for 99.99% of the population, mastering-quality FLAC files are overkill for everyday listening. From an archival perspective, though, it's not unreasonable. And as scary as it may seem to manage such a huge library of lossless files, it's totally doable.

As it stands, iTunes LPs are a bunch of compressed AAC files with music videos and lyrics attached (Haven't they been adding videos, bonus tracks and more to cheaper albums on iTunes forever?). For some, that's fine. But for me, if I'm going to pay $17 for a digital album, I need to get everything the $15 CD version offers and then some.

I was hoping today would be the day I could start buying music on iTunes. But until Apple or Amazon or any of the other major online music stores offer lossless audio downloads, I'm stuck clinging desperately to the sinking ship that is physical media.

And once lossless audio becomes the norm, I can't wait for everyone to start complaining the inadequacy of CD-quality downloaded audio.

I'll admit, the UI performance is impressive. The loading animation scales at a very high framerate, and then four video filters can be previewed at once—in real time. Sure, X-ray and Cyborg footage is too hokey for most of us to ever actually shoot with, but Apple's certainly made the experience painless enough...you know, other than on your eyes.

# mproved syncing for music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, and photos
# iTunes U content organization
# Redeem iTunes Gift Cards, codes, and certificates in the App Store
# Display available iTunes account credits in the App Store and iTunes Store
# Save video from Mail and MMS into Camera Roll
# Option to "Save as new clip" when trimming a video on iPhone 3GS
# Better iPhone 3G Wi-Fi performance when Bluetooth is turned on

* Remotely lock iPhone with a passcode via MobileMe
* Use Voice Control on iPhone 3GS with Bluetooth headsets
* Paste phone numbers into the keypad
* Option to use Home button to turn on accessibility features on iPhone 3GS
* Warn when visiting fraudulent websites in Safari (anti-phishing)
* Improved Exchange calendar syncing and invitation handling
* Fixes issue that cause some app icons to display incorrectly

Genius Recommendations for Apps

Get recommendations for apps you might like based on apps you've already downloaded.
Genius Mixes

Have iTunes automatically create mixes based on what's already in your library. You don't even have to choose a sample song.

Download Ringtones Wirelessly

Choose from thousands of iPhone ringtones on the iTunes Store and buy them with a tap.
Organize Apps in iTunes

Use iTunes on your computer to drag apps onto virtual Home screens, then sync them to your iPhone.

Here's the new iPod Nano. The paint is less matte, more shiny. The corners seem less sharp (a previous complaint of mine). But physically, it's about the same. The differences are inside.

The camera hole is on the bottom left of the face, so you end up putting your fingers over the lens and mic a lot if you're right handed. Slightly annoying.

The video recording is a capable 640x480, and there are 16 or so video effects you can overlay in real time onto your video. There's no zooming or editing, so this is barebones, but for quick video that you can take when you need it, it's pretty decent. Note: It does not take still photos.

Its pedometer functionality works as you'd expect. Same with the voice recorder—they're both straightforward, and the voice recorder is basically the same one you've seen on the iPhone.

The FM radio has the same problem that small devices have with radio in that you need to have your headphones in to get reception. Not a huge deal with the Nano, since you're going to always have your headphones in anyway. But we didn't get a chance to test FM reception since there were no headphones available.

All in all it feels exactly like the old Nano, except with new features—which is the point. So yeah, the polished/glossy finish looks very nice, and the new features like voiceover are useful if you're into that.

Have a look at our video, plus the full details.

• Video camera (640x480)
• NO STILL CAMERA
• Integrated mic
• Integrated speaker
• FM Radio!!!!! That you can pause!! And iTunes tag!
• One-click YouTube uploads (through your computer)
• Voice Over like Shuffle
• Pedometer with Nike+ syncing online
• Voice Recorder
• 2.2-inch screen that's .2 inches larger than last model

Starting today, the 8GB nano will cost $150 while the 16GB comes in at $180. (So why buy the 8?) What's the biggest surprise here? The camera we knew about. But the radio? The video support? The total lack of still camera support? I do have to admit, however, if it's this or a Flip, the nano is certainly more tempting.

Apple Introduces New iPod nano With Built-in Video Camera

World's Most Popular Music Player Now Available in Nine Brilliant Colors

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today introduced the new iPod nano®, adding a video camera, mic and speaker to the world's most popular music player. Music lovers can now shoot video wherever they are, view it on their iPod nano and use their computers to easily transfer their videos to YouTube. The new iPod nano features an ultra-thin and sleek design with a larger 2.2-inch color display and gorgeous polished aluminum and glass enclosure. iPod nano also features a built-in FM radio with live pause and iTunes® Tagging, as well as a built-in pedometer. The new iPod nano is available today in an 8GB model for $149 and a 16GB model for $179, and comes in nine brilliant colors including silver, black, purple, blue, green, orange, yellow, (PRODUCT) RED and pink.

"iPod nano is the world's most popular music player with over 100 million sold," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "And now we've added a video camera to its incredibly thin design, without any additional cost to the user."

iPod nano features a larger 2.2-inch display for easier navigating, enjoying album art, or shooting and viewing video clips. iPod nano is ultra-portable so users can shoot video wherever they are, in either portrait or landscape. iPod nano customers can share videos instantly with friends using its display and speaker, or sync with a Mac® or PC and share them on YouTube, MobileMe(TM), Facebook or via email.* iPod nano can even shoot videos with fun real-time effects such as Thermal, Film Grain, Kaleido and X-Ray.

iPod nano now has a built-in FM radio with live pause and iTunes Tagging. Live pause lets iPod nano users pause and resume playing their favorite FM radio shows. iTunes Tagging is great when users hear a song they like, they can simply tag it, and then preview and purchase that song when they sync to iTunes.** iPod nano also features Genius Mixes, which automatically creates up to 12 endless mixes of songs from your iTunes library that go great together.

iPod nano is also now an even better workout companion with the new built-in pedometer. iPod nano can keep track of your steps taken and calories burned, helping you meet your short and long-term fitness goals.

iPod nano provides up to 24 hours of music playback or five hours of video playback on a single charge. The 8GB model holds up to 2,000 songs, 7,000 photos, eight hours of video and seven hours of captured video; and the 16GB model holds up to 4,000 songs, 14,000 photos, 16 hours of video and 14 hours of captured video.***

iPod® is the world's most popular family of digital music players with over 220 million sold. Apple's new holiday lineup includes iPod shuffle® in five great colors starting at just $59; iPod classic® in a new 160GB model holding up to 40,000 songs for $249; the new iPod nano with a video camera available in nine brilliant polished aluminum colors starting at $149; and the revolutionary iPod touch® now starting at the breakthrough price of just $199.

Pricing & Availability

The new iPod nano is available immediately for a suggested price of $149 (US) for the 8GB model and $179 (US) for the 16GB model in silver, black, purple, blue, green, orange and pink through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. The 8GB and 16GB iPod nano in yellow and (PRODUCT) RED are available through the Apple Store (www.apple.com) and Apple's retail stores. iPod nano requires a Mac with a USB 2.0 port, Mac OS® X v10.4.11 or later and iTunes 9; or a Windows PC with a USB 2.0 port and Windows Vista or Windows XP Home or Professional (Service Pack 3) or later and iTunes 9.

*MobileMe is available to persons 13 and older. Annual membership fee and Internet access required. Terms apply.

**Currently available only in the US on radio stations that support iTunes Tagging.

***Battery life and number of charge cycles vary by use and settings. See www.apple.com/batteries for more information. Music capacity is based on four minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding; photo capacity is based on iPod-viewable photos transferred from iTunes; and video capacity is based on H.264 1.5 Mbps video at 640-by-480 resolution.

The Special Edition version comes only in 4GB, and it being polished stainless steel, weights a bit more. Phil Schiller, in an interview with Brian, said that the process for doing the special edition in stainless steel was different than the aluminum models. It costs $20 more. The heft of the special edition makes it feel more special, said Brian. But I'm not sure if it's $20 more special.

Apple's iPod shuffle Now Starts at Just $59

World's Smallest Music Player Now in Five Great Colors

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today announced that iPod shuffle®, the world's smallest music player and the first music player to talk to you, is now available starting at just $59 in five great colors. iPod shuffle's intuitive controls are conveniently located on the headphone cord, letting you navigate and enjoy music without even looking. With the press of a button, you can play, pause, adjust volume and switch playlists, plus the VoiceOver feature lets iPod shuffle speak song titles, artists and playlist names. The iPod shuffle is available worldwide today in a new 2GB model for just $59 and a 4GB model for $79, and both models come in silver, black, pink, blue and green.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090909/SF72800)

"iPod shuffle is the world's smallest music player and now comes in five great colors starting at just $59," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "iPod shuffle is so small that you almost forget it's there, yet remarkably, it holds up to 1,000 songs and talks to you."

iPod shuffle is based on Apple's incredibly popular shuffle feature, which randomly selects songs from your music library. iPod shuffle features a sleek and ultra-wearable design with a built-in stainless steel clip. iPod shuffle users can easily clip it to almost anything and take it everywhere.

In addition to the Apple Earphones and Apple In-Ear Headphones with Remote, third party manufacturers including Sony, V-MODA, Klipsch and Scosche are supporting built-in headphone controls and Belkin and Scosche offer built-in headphone adapters allowing users to enjoy iPod shuffle with their own headphones.

iPod® is the world's most popular family of digital music players with over 220 million sold. Apple's new holiday lineup includes iPod shuffle in five great colors starting at just $59; iPod classic® in a new 160GB model holding up to 40,000 songs for $249; the incredible new iPod nano® with a video camera available in nine brilliant polished aluminum colors starting at $149; and the revolutionary iPod touch® starting at the breakthrough price of just $199.

Pricing & Availability

The third generation iPod shuffle is available immediately for a suggested price of $59 (US) for the 2GB model and $79 (US) for the 4GB model in silver, black, pink, blue and green through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. A 4GB special edition polished stainless steel model is available in a 4GB model for $99 (US) through the Apple Store (www.apple.com) and Apple's retail stores. iPod shuffle comes with the Apple Earphones with Remote and the iPod shuffle USB cable. iPod shuffle requires a Mac® with a USB 2.0 port, Mac OS® X v10.4.11 or later and iTunes® 9 or later; or a Windows PC with a USB 2.0 port and Windows Vista, Windows XP Home or Professional (Service Pack 3) or later.

Here's what's new in the most significant update to iTunes in years:

iTunes LPs: These are effectively like bonus CDs for digital albums. Each one comes with extra songs that you only get if you plunk down nearly $20 on the whole album—you can't download these individually. Along with that, you get video content—in most cases, live concert recordings—as well as photo albums and lyrics, which serve as a sort of modern-day liner notes, I guess? It's a bit like buying one of those loaded-up "Digipack" CDs record companies used to release, except on iTunes.

Many albums come with a special custom display mode, so all this fancy new content isn't just dumped into iTunes' regular audio and video browsers, which would seem like a waste.

iTunes Extra: Like iTunes LPs for films, this gives you a downloadable equivalent of DVD extras for films, with interviews, supplemental clips and photo galleries. Some of the extras, like the ones for Wall-E shown here, are a little more interactive, and have their own distinct interface.

A New Store: As for the storefront itself, all content is now organized in a new layout, which looks a lot more like a software interface, and less like a heavily formatted webpage. For example, you can now quick-view albums, which opens Preview-style windows that let you see what's behind a given link in the store, and there's an ever-present menu bar that lives up top, replacing the cumbersome breadcrumb navigation from before.

A Tweaked Interface: Apple's rearranged a couple of interface elements here, moving the "Artists" browser to the far left as tall column, and changing the color of the app chrome so it's a little lighter than other apps, which is a bit odd, and visually jarring.

Media Sharing: The software's getting some pretty fantastic new functionality outside the store as well—it's got media sharing, at least on your local network: You can copy songs, movies, and TV shows to up to 5 authorized computers, or simply stream them. This is pretty huge, and a definite about-face for Apple, which has been slowly stripping out sharing functionality from iTunes from the beginning.

An App Manager: On the iPhone/iPod front, now you can rearrange and manage apps from within iTunes, which was one of those stupid-simple feature upgrades people (and by people, I mean we) have been clamoring for for months. Apple's version of the app manager is better thought out than the concepts we've seen before, which were already droolworthy. Apps can be dragged and dropped, either alone or in groups, and selectively synced. Awesome.

Syncing, Genius and Social Networking: A few odds and ends here—iTunes 9 also brings finer sync controls, including options to sync genres or artists instead of just playlists, and more options for video and photo syncing. There are also new "Genius Playlists," which are just general library mixes that iTunes thinks you'll like, rather than the old Genius playlists, which were based on a particular artist. Social networking support is nowhere near as deep as rumored—it just gives you shortcuts to spam your friends with links to iTunes store pages over Twitter, et al. Apple's also thrown in a little treat for Windows users: Playback controls from the Windows 7 task bar.—Thanks, Daniel!

The Palm Pre: No longer works. Soon, it probably will again, then a few months later, Apple will break it with another update. And so on and so on, forever.

But on the whole, this release raises just one big question: iTunes, did you just get good?
UPDATE: Here's a walkthrough gallery, for the best of what's new in iTunes 9:

iTunes 9 is available today, as is plenty of iTunes LP and Extra content. For more, stay tuned to our liveblog.

Apple Premieres iTunes 9

Featuring iTunes LP, Home Sharing, Genius Mixes & Improved Syncing

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today introduced iTunes® 9, the latest version of the world's most popular software application to purchase, manage and play media, packed with innovative features such as iTunes LP, Home Sharing and Genius Mixes, as well as a redesigned store and improved syncing. iTunes 9 makes it easier than ever to discover, purchase and enjoy your music, movies, TV shows, and apps for iPhone(TM) and iPod touch® from Apple's revolutionary App Store. Plus, Home Sharing now lets you easily transfer songs, movies and TV shows to other computers in your home.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090909/AQ72764)

"iTunes 9 is a great iTunes release, with innovative features that make using iTunes better than ever and iTunes content richer than ever," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "iTunes LP, for example, lets artists share more of their creativity with fans and gives music lovers the feeling of being immersed in an entire album with art, lyrics, liner notes, photos and videos."

iTunes LP is the next evolution of the music album delivering a rich, immersive experience for select albums on the iTunes Store by combining beautiful design with expanded visual features like live performance videos, lyrics, artwork, liner notes, interviews, photos, album credits and more. iTunes LP debuts today with albums including Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited," Norah Jones' "Come Away With Me," The Grateful Dead's "American Beauty" and Dave Matthews Band's "Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King: iTunes Pass." The new iTunes Extras provides a similar experience for movies on iTunes with features including documentaries, deleted scenes, interviews and interactive galleries. iTunes Extras is now available for select movies including "Twilight," "Batman Begins," "WALL-E," "Iron Man" and "The Da Vinci Code." Customers can enjoy iTunes LP and iTunes Extras on a Mac® or PC.

iTunes 9 also introduces Home Sharing, which lets you easily transfer music, movies and TV shows among up to five authorized computers in your home. Family members can now view up to five iTunes libraries on their home network, see only the portion of these libraries they don't already have, import their favorite content directly to their own libraries, and automatically add new purchases from other computers into their library.

The incredibly popular Genius feature gets even better with Genius Mixes which are created using the results of over 27 million music libraries with over 54 billion songs that have been submitted and analyzed by Genius. The new Genius Mixes feature is like having a "Genius" DJ that automatically generates up to 12 endless mixes of songs from your iTunes library that go great together.

With improved syncing in iTunes 9 and iPhone OS 3.1, you can now organize your iPhone apps right in iTunes and they will automatically appear on your iPhone with the same layout. Plus, syncing music, photos, movies and TV shows is easier than ever with the added ability to sync music by artist and genre and sync photos by Events and Faces. The iTunes Store on iPhone now features precut ringtone downloads with over 20,000 ringtones priced at just $1.29.

iTunes 9 is available immediately as a free download at www.itunes.com.