Apple’s Showtime Announcements Reviewed
Apple hit the tech world with a raft of announcements at their “Showtime” event on Tuesday. Now that Ryan and I have had a chance to talk about some of the new products and services, here is our take on Tuesday’s announcements.
The much ballyhooed “widescreen video iPod” was not to be at this event. Instead we got refreshed full-size iPods (now widely being referred to as 5.5G) with:
- 60% brighter screens
- Larger hard drives (30GB and 80GB)
- Longer battery life (3.5 hours and 6.5 hours of video playback respectively)
- Lower prices ($249 and $349)
- New headphones
- Gapless Playback
- Instant Searching
- Letter overlay when scrolling
- New Games
At first glance, these updates are a bit underwhelming, but taken all together they make for some pretty nice enhancements, especially given the $50 price reduction. The pieces of this puzzle that I am most excited about are the gapless playback and searching improvements. Ever since making the transition to digital music I’ve been really bummed out about the small gaps between songs that originally flowed into each other. If you have an album on CD where say, track 3 and 4 blend right into one another, the new iPods will play these songs without a gap between them as originally intended by the artist. Nice!
The ability to search for songs on the iPod using text and the letter overlay while scrolling are also welcome additions. Using the touch wheel to zip around 30-80GB of songs was getting a bit tiresome. These new features allow you to search for songs or albums by using the wheel to select letters instead of just scrubbing back and forth through the entire list until you find the track you are looking for.
Way, way more thoughts after the jump!
