This video of a homemade beer cannon recently made my Must See YouTube Videos playlist. Watch closely for the Snakes on a Plane gag.

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!

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A stand-alone set top box that will stream pictures, audio, and video from an existing Mac or PC library? Now that’s interesting.

Looks like the iTunes Music Store is down this morning. Undoubtedly this has to do with Apple’s surprise announcement at 10:00am PDT. Perhaps we are in for a new iTunes Movie Store (Media Store?) after all. The rumor mills have been revving for the past couple of weeks about today’s announcements. Everything from updated multi-color iPod Nanos to a new video-capable Airport Express have been hyped, but as always, all we can do is sit on our hands and wait for 1:00pm EDT to roll around before we will know the truth. Personally, I’ll be watching Engadget’s coverage of the event as they always seem to have news and images that are up to the minute.

As always, we’ll share our thoughts on the announcements once the Reality Distortion Field has receded and we have had some time to examine the merits of any new products/services.  Until then, enjoy the ride!

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