It was good to see Steve Jobs back on the scene again yesterday. There were several announcements about new iPod updates, most of which didn’t interest me. Funny enough, the two things that did interest me about the new products things that didn’t interest me, had to do with cameras.
The iPod Nano got a video camera and the iPod Touch didn’t. In an interview with Steve Jobs in the New York Times by David Pogue, Jobs explained it’s absence as being related to price and market interest.
…Apple is really pitching the iPod Touch as a game machine these days. And to do that, you have to make it as inexpensive as possible.
“Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine,” he said. “We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really see is it’s the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw. So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to $199. We don’t need to add new stuff. We need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.”
Another interesting thing about the video camera in the iPod Nano is that it can’t take still pictures. Jobs explained that it couldn’t, because of differences in the size of hardware that enable it to take still pictures versus capturing video.
iPhone 3.1
Apple updated the iPhone software from 3.0 to 3.1. The main new features included:
- Genius is now supported for applications
- Access to 30,000 ringtones (woop-de-doo!)
- Voice control now works over Bluetooth
- Keeps original copies of videos after editing
iTunes 9
iTunes experienced an upgrade. Overall, I like the new polished look and features. The main new featured included:
- Manage your screens for iPhone
- Support for new multimedia enhancements for albums
- Tweaks galore!
Of course it also included one more new feature, breaking the Palm Pre syncing. Haha, suckers! Oh, and the other suckers are iPod Touch owners, who still have to pay for the iPhone 3.1 update.