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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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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Those fancy laser-projected keyboards that started showing up around the web last year are now shipping to consumers. This unit, for sale over at ThinkGeek for $179.99, is about the size of a matchbook and projects a full Qwerty keyboard for use with bluetooth equipped devices. The level of compatibility is quite impressive, 6 different operating systems are supported including Nokia’s Symbian and Palm’s OS 5  (though Mac OS X support is “limited”).

Using one of these with a Treo or nicely equipped PDA could make for a viable laptop replacement!

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Gaming enthusiasts who have followed the continual advancements in technology no doubt remember the tremendous impact dedicated graphics processors had on PC gaming back when they debuted in the era of 3DFX and Matrox. Separating the heavy graphical lifting from the main computer processor to a separate graphics card allowed developers the push the limits of their products to create more and more realistic and therefore compelling entertainment software.

A similar revolution may be gaining in the PC gaming industry, this time promising to create far more realistic and breathtaking physics that will allow cloth to tear, water to splash, and wooden crates (every gamer’s arch nemesis) to shred under a hail of bullets.

You guessed it: a company called Ageia has created a stand-alone physics processing card called “PhysX” that handles the hardcore mathematical processing needed to create realistic physics in-game. Their premiere title for the card is called CellFactor, and it features are incredible array of objects that the player can manipulate with psychic faculties.

Check out a video after the jump!

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