Apple Announces New Rocking iPods, Video Camera, And More

The best part of today's Apple iPod Event at the Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco came at the very beginning, when a frail but "vertical" Steve Jobs appeared on stage, with an appeal for people to register as organ donors, crediting his own recovery and liver transplant to "a good, 20s person who died in a car crash and was generous enough to donate their organs."

He began with the announcement of the release of the iPhone OS 3.1, including Genius for Apps, and ringtones, but not much more.

iTunes 9 introduced a lot more cool features, though, including the ability to create Genius mixes or even smarter playlists, enhanced iPod syncing, and app management through iTunes. This capability makes it easier to drag and drop applications to the iPhone or iPod Touch, enabling better app management on the devices. Another useful feature was home sharing, allowing users to physically copy media between 5 computers through iTunes. The iTunes LP option for music not yet released on CD is now available, providing for even greater choice of music in the redesigned iTunes store. The iTunes store now has the ability to send items to a wishlist, Facebook, or Twitter, increasing its sociability.

The benefits of the iPod Touch were then highlighted, but in typical Apple arrogance, unnecessary potshots were taken at Sony, Dell, Nintendo, EA, and naturally Microsoft, but notably not Google. In fact, Google was prominent by its absence, perhaps underscored by regulatory scrutiny. The iPod Touch was positioned as equivalent to any console, with nifty games and same-day release of major upcoming titles like Assassin's Creed 2, Madden NFL 2010, and a new FPS, Nova, which had Halo-style themes and the ability to listen to music while playing the game in solo or multiplayer modes.

Prices have dropped across the iPod family, with the Touch now ranging from $199 to $399, for 8 GB to as high as 64 GB, and the ability to run OpenGL graphics, which will be very smooth indeed.

As a parting shot, Steve Jobs introduced the at-first cool, but on closer look ho-hum video camera aboard the redesigned iPod Nano 5G. While the Nano is almost 5 times slimmer than its obvious rival, the Cisco Flip Mino, and bundles a lot more features, it does not record in HD, and more surprisingly, the video camera would not be available currently on other models, including the iPod Touch or iPhone. This definitely underwhelms compared to the Cisco Flip Mino HD and even the upcoming Microsoft Zune HD.

The video camera on the iPod Nano 5G records H.264 VGA video in 640 x 480, up to 30 frames per second with AAC audio, and has a host of special effects. It will unfortunately not be a downloadable feature for the 100 million+ Nanos already sold:)