Laskys E-Zine

Now that I’ve finally been able to brush the cobwebs off from a late night watching Apple’s keynote speech. I thought I best put together a summary of last night events. The trendy ones amongst you may have seen the minute by minute updates I posted on Twitter http://twitter.com/LaskysEzine . Apologies as a lot of what I wrote looking back probably makes no sense to anyone seeing it this morning.

So what was announced?

Jobs opened with a summary of 2nd Apple store to be opened in China, the new London Covent Garden store and a soon to be opened store in Spain. Then it was on to what we all tuned in for. New products and developments.

iOS

Few numbers were thrown around first. Since the first release of iOS. 120 million devices have been shipped, 230k activations a day, 6.5 billion apps downloaded (approx 200 apps downloaded a second).

Key features for the new iOS 4.1:

Bugs in Proximity sensor, Bluetooth, iPhone 3G fixed

HDR photos (High Dynamic Range photos). Simple concept, when you take a photo sometimes it’s blown out with bright light. What HDR does is take 3 photos in rapid succession: one normal, one under exposed, and one under exposed. This is then all combined to make one standout photo.

Game Center with the assistance of Mike Capps from Epic Games. Effectively this is online multi-player gaming for iPhone. Mike Capps then demonstrated working titled first person beat um up “Project Sword” on the iPhone 4. Within a matter of minutes Mike was owned by the games designer, “This is what you get when you take a designer on at his own game,”. Similar to Xbox Live and Playstation Network this game and Game Center app will come with an array of achievements to unlock.

iOS 4.1 to be released later this week. But before you could even settle back down. Jobs moves on to iOS 4.2.

iPad based. Combining HDR photos, Game Center, multi tasking and Air Play. Air Play, which many of you may know as Air Tunes allows you to stream music from all over your house from your mobile device. This is now renamed as Air Tunes and aswell as music all forms of media can be streamed anywhere in the home. Another key feature they were keen to showoff was wireless printing via Print Center.

iOS 4.2 will be available from November.

Jobs then moved on to the part of the presentation many people were anicipating. The new range of iPods. There was a big revamp of the shuffle, nano and touch models. However the classic wasn’t mentioned, which maybe an indication that this is to be phased out.

iPod shuffle

First noticable thing is that the buttons are now back. Apparently people missed the buttons. So as well as buttons being added, Genius mixes also feature, VoiceOver and a clip at the back. iPod shuffle will come in 5 colours at a retail price of £39.

iPod nano

The nano is a very popular model so how could Apple possibly make it better. Jobs’ solution was to make the screen purley touchbased and remove the click wheel. It’s tiny (46% smaller and 42% lighter than its predecessor) and really easy to use.  The new nano also features hard volume buttons, VoiceOver, FM radio, Nike+, pedometer, 24 languages and 24 hours of audio playback. Also the screen can be rotated using your fingers if the nano is clipped on to your person.

nano will come in the the same 5 colours as the shuffle aswell as red and graphite. Also will be in two capacities 8GB which retails for £129 and 16GB at £159

iPod touch

Jobs’ dubbed the touch as “the iPhone without a phone. But it’s also an iPhone without the contract!”. Which has not only overtaken the nano in popularity. But also Sony and Nintendo (50%+ marketshare worldwide) in the portable gaming market.

The touch has been revamped to feature Retina Display, 4x the number of pixels as per the iPhone. And an A4 chip which also powers the iPhone. Also features 3-axis gyro, iOS 4.1 with Game Center,  front-facing camera with FaceTime and rear camera for HD video recording.

The touch comes in 3 sizes 8GB from £189, 32GB from £249 and 64GB from £329.

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But what would a new iPod launch be without an update to iTunes.

iTunes 10

itunes 10 has ditched the CD from the logo.

Other cool features, if your library as 5 or more tracks from one album. Rather than having a string of album names in your list of songs, the space is now occupied by the album art work.

The major development within iTunes is Ping. So what is Ping? If your familiar with Facebook and Last FM this is the hybrid of both. Basically if you want to discover new music, find out what your friends are listening to and what your favourite artists are up to.

This will also be available on iPhone and iPad via a dedicated app.

iTunes 10 is available now.

“one last thing hobby”

Apple TV (not iTV as speculated) is now in it’s 2nd generation. Although it’s sold reasonably well and well recieved by it’s users. A lot of people do not understand the purpose of it. Why? People don’t want to manage storage of films and TV shows on a device that’s not a computer and nor do they want to have to sync the device with a computer.

So Apple have taken generation 1 and shunk it in size to 1/4 of it’s origanal size, so it’s palm size. The back is also simple, one power point, one HDMI slot and ethernet point. But most importantly it’s Wi-Fi enabled. Also no media is stored on the device, either rent films ($4.99 1st run)  and TV shows (99c per episode), stream content from your PC, view videos from You Tube, Netflixs and stills from Flickr.

What else can it do. Remember Air Play? Air Play can stream content from an iOS device to an Apple TV.

“You’re going to be able to watcha movie on an iPad, walk into your living room, and push a button and watch the rest of it on your Apple TV. Walk into your home with photos on your iPhone, push a button and share a slideshow on your TV. It’s going to be pretty cool.”

All this at £99

All products are now available on Laskys

iPods – http://bit.ly/8YQeJO

Apple TV GEN 2 – http://bit.ly/aca4rK