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New Apple iPod with Photo Capabilities
artlu was the first of many to submit: "I was just watching my Dow Jones streaming news wire, and I saw that Apple is releasing a new iPod that will have photo captabilities. The news stated that the new iPod will be able to hold 25,000 photos as well as your traditional iPod functionality." Apple's got a page up about the iPod Photo and of course a press release.
In addition to the iPod Photo, which comes in 40GB and new 60GB flavors for $499 and $599 respectively, there's also:
- iPod U2 Special Edition ($349)
- The Complete U2, a digital box set of every song ever recorded by U2, plus some crazy and rare recordings, available in November for $149 via the iTunes Music Store, with a $50 certificate towards it with the iPod U2 Edition
- iTunes 4.7
- QuickTime 6.5.2
- iPod Updater 3.0.4 (2004-10-20)
- iPod-focused Apple Store: iPod Store
- EU iTunes Music Store added to 9 more European nations, with over 700,000 songs
- iTunes Music Store is coming to Canada in November
- Press releases
Other cool things: in addition to its dock, the iPod Photo can also even output video via its own headphone jack with a special 1/8" AV cable, and the 220x176 65536-color screen also displays album art while playing, as well as color games, etc! (Don't have much/any album art? Get it!)
While Steve Jobs talked at length during the presentation about why Apple isn't doing video on a portable device itself for reasons of battery life, device/screen size, weight, etc, now that this device has video output capabilities, I think it's a clear sign of the direction; that is, future devices - or future firmware - being able to output video content to an external monitor/projector. Imagine this: your iPod dock, already at your entertainment center. The iTunes Movie Store (or, your own iMovie content). H.264/MPEG AVC (Microsoft WMV9/VC-1 has hit some snags in its bid for standardization). Download a movie, sync to your iPod. Drop the iPod in its video dock at your TV (or ANY device that has video inputs). Done. And a LOT cleaner and easier than having a whole separate computer that needs to be maintained as a part of your entertainment center. Add 802.11g with things like AirPort Express to the mix, and who knows what might come...
A little more info: .75 in compared to .57 and .69 in for the 20GB and 40GB previous model. The weight about the same however, 6.4 ounces compared to 5.6 and 6.2.
... it doesnt. Not to mention $600 (and $500 for that matter) is really reaching, considering we are just talking about music and pictures
Advertised 15 hour battery life
65k-color screen
220 x 176 pixel resolution
Same click wheel as previous generation
Not mentioned (at least in my first pass) is that, the dock will connect to tvs and display a slideshow.
Includes AV Cable (supposedly 3-plug RCA) The new ipods are slightly thicker. Each of the new ones is
Does anyone else think that this a bit overkill. 60Gb is a LOT when you are just talking about music and pictures. It would be one thing if this generation included video playback, but
In other apple news Apple Launches 9 Euro iTunes Music Stores
An iPod with picture capabilties: I dub thee The iPorn
Trolling is a art,
You can get cheaper products for $50 which will allow you to do more creative slideshows, effects, etc.
I think Apple missed the boat here. The killer function they should add to the iPod is a camera- which goes along nicely with the photo storage features. Nothing flashy or expensive, but for another $50 they could add a lens that's better than the cell phone cams.
Photo *display* capabilities. When I think of photo capabilities, I think of something take can _take_ photos.
included with the announcement is news that 9 additional countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain) in Europe now have access to the iTunes Music Store and that the much awaited Canadian store will be available in November.
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
One of those little extra touches that always puts Apple products ahead of their competitors.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
.
Photos and contacts and solitaire sounds like fun stuff, but what about any new audio related features--you know, since it's an audio portable and all.
Something tells me they managed to overlook Gapless Playback and OGG/FLAC support again.
If so, please visit http://store.apple.com/ ... please?
that photo capability as a secondary feature is just about worthless. Pretty soon, I'll have a phone that surfs the web, plays games, takes photos, cooks dinner, plays mp3s, wavs, oggs, avis, mpegs, and can predict the weather. None of which I'll be using since my ipod will do that anyways.
Does anyone else think that this a bit overkill. 60Gb is a LOT when you are just talking about music and pictures.
Think movies.
See the last paragraph here.
Here we go again, people saying this iPod won't be a hit. They said the same thing on the original iPod and the iPod Mini. Those were both huge hits, and this one will be too.
They just added Album Art, but I want to see the entire Album insert, lyrics, artist facts and news. How hard would that be to add for songs purchased from Itunes. Think of the Value-add. It would be nice to have a FM transmitter was well.
I'm on a few different sides of this. (It goes without saying, first, that it looks pretty cool.)
The iPod has revolutionized music in the past few years because of its simplicity and style. It does one thing, it does it very well, and it looks damn good while doing it. The iPod Photo kind of blurs those lines. Obviously, the iPod could become the next-gen portable media center: music, video, a Belkin iTV something-or-other. This gives us a glimmer of where they plan to go with this. iCinema Movie Store?
It might not, also, but I'm leaving it up to somebody else to consider thinking of ways the IP could change the way we even think about our personal photography and wallpapers and whatnot -- like the iPod changed the way many people listen to music (albums out, playlists & shuffle in). That is to say, it looks weird as a product now, but somebody's in a room somewhere thinking of ways to make this thing awesome -- maybe. And that's why I question its branding as a separate entity, because it can't just be an iPod with a color screen, no -- it's iPod Photo!
I know that whereas I have a good number of digital pictures, a $500 device with a color screen can't be $499.75 better than a damn CD-R (e.g., most DVD players now will do the same TV sharing thing with a CD-R full of JPEGs). And I own an iPod already, so I can easily see the argument for convenience among others.
I also want to know, where does this leave iPhoto? "Now, you too can organize your pictures.. in iTunes! But you don't. You just download them there. You organize your pictures in iPhoto but you download them with iTunes, but you can also do it in iTunes if you want. Got it?"
Music, and the way that we deal with it, is such a rich site for interaction (music, audiobooks, speeches, recordings, class lectures, whatever) that it's hard to imagine where they could take photos. But then again, I mean, music, yanno, you listen to it. Photos, yanno, you look at them. So who knows.
http://www.apple.com/ipodphoto/: "Use the included AV cable to connect iPod Photo to a projector or TV."
Every version of the iPod was predicted to "fail". From the original 5Mb to the mini.
And every prediction was incorrect, to say the least.
The iPod Photo will be wildly successful, and evolve to be the standard by which all others are judged.
...here.
You're an idiot.
Sure if you had to edit some XML file it would never happen but Apple doesn't make you do that. It stores meta-data without you even noticing: meta-information from cameras is transparently copied over and used, other meta-data is attached just by dragging a photo to a folder.
The same is true of album art, drag and drop and it's there.
Not everything (fails to) work like Windows: that's why those of us who value our time pay a little extra to buy a properly designed system rather than some cobbled together crap from Dell and Windows.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
No, it meows when you turn it on then it scratches your face off if you handle it too roughly and manage to ding its hard disk.
I think the "shit all over the carpet" feature is for the next generation.
trust me, you don't want the apple earbuds anyways, whatever color they are.
sony makes some very nice earbuds that come in black. surprisingly good sound quality, and they don't hurt your ears one bit. i've had them on for hours at a time with no discomfort. sony has a lot of similar ones, but the mdr-ex71's are great.
it helps to break them in a bit first. crank up the audio from the ipod to full for 5 or 6 minutes, and you're all set.
Maybe I'm a luddite, but I just don't care for photos on my iPod.
:P Problem was, you had to navigate through 3 pages of icons just to get to the app you needed.
Part of what makes my iPod so nice is that its interface is really simple. I think that this is due, in part, to the fact that it doesn't do a large variety of things. All it does is play music based on playlist, artist, or album.
I've seen similar cluttering on my TiVo. It used to be just about 4 or 5 menu items on the main screen. Now, it's packed from the top of the screen to the bottom.
My old Symbian phone did tons of stuff. Games, calendar, to-do list, camera, web browser... you could even make phone calls with it.
I don't want my iPod to become like my cell phone.
...about the original iPod, and iPod mini.
And they're runaway successes, to put it mildly.
On one hand, we had analysts and pundits of all types saying Apple will fail if it *didn't* include photo/video functionality in a handheld, and now we've got a luminary here predicting it will fail because it *did*.
Well, I think I'll trust Apple's judgment on this one, considering it seems to know what it's doing, thank you.
Especially when you are using the device as temporary storage for a photo shoot. My Canon 10D files are an average of 6MB. Give me a few hours at a weding or a sports event and I will be filling that drive up pretty fast.
Last summer I shot over 3000 pictures in two days at a trap shooting competition - that's roughly 18 GB of photos. Everything fit in my camera bag and I got some great pics.
Does it strike anybody else as odd that you manage your photos on this thing using iTunes instead of iPhoto where you are presumably managing your photos? I realize that iTunes already has all the iPod management code built in and that it would be awkward to have iPhoto and iTunes working to manage the iPod at the same time - but it still feels contrived.
Maybe we're supposed to just deal with it until Apple gets Tiger out the door and Sync services are built into the OS proper? It just doesn't feel very Mac-Like this way...
Culture is more than commerce
I've owned a Canon Digital Rebel (EOS 300D) for a little over 3 months now and have acquired approximately 7GB of photos in that time (not counting RAW images). This is purely a hobby. I'm sure other amateur photographers will agree with me that 60GB isn't really overkill, even just for photos, let alone for both photos and music.
Yeah, that sucks.
/mnt/NameOfYouriPod
It IS possible to get your music off of an iPod, though, especially since you're using OS X.
Plug it in, and don't let it sync with iTunes. Leave it plugged in, as it should be mounted as a drive.
I'm not at home right now, so I can't tell you exactly what the mount point is, but it should be something like
Just go browsing through the directories. Copy the music off into a music directory in your home dir, and you've got your music again, minus the metadata.
Not to be preachy, but you should have made a backup of the files. Apple encourages this, and you can even find documentation (official documentation) on how to make iTunes burn discs with data on them so you can back up your files.
Why didn't you do some research before reformatting your iBook? Why didn't you do some research on how to pull music from your iPod back into iTunes? This process is very well documented all over the place.
It sounds to me like you are either trolling, or really didn't know what you were doing when you started this process.
Remember, data, especially purchased data, is important. Always back it up.
If you had authorized the laptop, you would have been able to play from the iPod, but only if you DIDN'T synch. There is a program called iPodRip that you can use to copy the songs from the iPod to your hard drive and then add them to iTunes (and again, if you authorize the laptop, you're all set). The no multiple downloads thing is a bad idea, I think, but the one-way synching was a requirement imposed by the major record labels.
Looks like it's time for this link again.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. -You know who...
Put readers for all of them in, and grow the iPod photo even further (already noted that it's thicker than the 4G iPod)
Build multiple versions of the iPod photo, each with a different card reader to minimize size impact, but complicating manufacture, inventory, and marketing (40GB/SD, 60GB/xD, 40GB/Memory stick, etc.)
Leave the card reader out to keep things simple (and less expensive to manufacture and support), and let third parties fill in the gap with an external device -- possibly like a revised version of the existing Belkin card reader
I'm not surprised Apple chose #3. Now, why Apple didn't design the iPod photo to download photos directly from a digital camera via a USB 2.0 cable, that's another question entirely...
"My order takes pride in knowing all that can be known, and most of all the rest..." --Galen
iCaramba!
The iPod does miss the boat too, however; at least at the moment it looks like you can only tranfer photos via iTunes (if you want to be able to view them on the screen), which means you need a computer to connect between your camera and the iPod (and also means that they will be stored in whatever format iTunes uses, not in raw format). There is already a tool out that lets you transfer photos to an iPod for storage, but again, you lose any iPod interface to looking at the photos.
Honestly this would be a cool gimmick but I wouldn't see myself buying one. I could see buying a device that was made to store photos that had a bigger screen, smaller clickwheel (or put it on the back), and an easy way to get information from photo media (CF, stick, whatever) into the device in whatever format you want, as well as an easy way to plug the device into a TV to play back. The point would be to eliminate the computer as the intermediary, so you can just carry around your camera and this thing... no need to buy new media every time you fill up the stick, and no need to run home to your computer in the middle of a shoot.
I bit the bullet and purchased a 40GB 4G in July/August to upgrade/replace a 128MB RCA Lyra that started my addiction of having music with me at all times. In the 3 months of heavy use of my iPod, here's the list of what i would like to see:
integrated SD-memory reading (my dig camera uses SD cards, they're smaller than CF, and while not as flexible as far as legacy use and capacity, almost every portable device i've looked into purchasing uses SD or xD memory over CF.
REMOVEABLE BATTERY - for the love of christ would they get this one right. it would really ease my mind significantly if they'd make it interchangable at home, maybe on the fly, where i can keep a spare battery handy as i do for my cell phone and dig camera, (2 spares in teh case of the camera) and when one goes dead, i do a swap. the thought of having to send my 4G off in a year or two at the cost of an ADDITIONAL $100 because they found it more convienent to design an integrated battery on an otherwise superior product gives me shivers.
iCal and Address Book for Windows, or at the very least an iTunes extention that lets you manage these two precious entities. Oh, and a smart playlist parameter for whether or not a song is checked!
Adjustable click wheel sensitivity and a dedicated reset button. My wheel has the most annoying tendancy to NOT want to move ONE click. no matter how softly i caress it or how little i bump it i usually move 2 or 3. maybe it's because i have larger than normal fingers or something. idk. also, if the thing has the remote possibility of choking on a bad mp3 and crashing, i'd love to have a manual reset button that doesn't go through software. That process sounds like something M$ came up with. many times mine will crash and run itself dead because the reset method doesn't work. even docked.
If they're going to integrate a color screen onto the ipod they shouldn't have went the LCD route, but used emerging tech like full color organic Electro-Luminescent displays (think Pioneer's high end car stereos) Sony just released a PDA in japan based on this screen design, which is far superior to LCD for the parameters of a portable device. It requires no battery-hungry and heat generating back light. It has better viewability (word?) in direct sunlight than LCDs. It may not have the color detail, but the resolutions are comparable. It would be suitable for a small display like the iPod Photo's. This would ahve allowed them to retain at least somehwat more of the battery life.
Are you listening Mr Jobs? Some of these things are not that damned difficult to implement, and others would just take a bit of time and effort.
And the most bizarre introduction:
iPod Socks
Added with Mini Pocket Warmers you can go jogging in Faribanks, Alaska, with your iPod, and not fear frost-pod-bite. Probably not a real good idea
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
I'm not surprised Apple chose #3. Now, why Apple didn't design the iPod photo to download photos directly from a digital camera via a USB 2.0 cable, that's another question entirely...
USB Host support is much more complex than just being a USB device. Plus they would have to deal with multiple protocols and even some device drivers. Just look at the size of the code that makes up libgphoto!
As an Apple shareholder and happy owner of some Apple products, all I can say is: Thank God Slashdot members don't run Apple.
Every time Apple introduces a new product, there is an endless series of posts about why it sucks, why it won't sell, what features were left out, why the new features are worthless, why it's too expensive, lists of poorly selling products that are "superior" and have more features and on and on and on.
Apple's revenues are up, their profits are up, they have a slew of successful products and they have a lot of happy customers.
Give it a rest guys. Let the market decide if the latest offering sucks. Based on history, when Slashdotters say an Apple product won't sell, it ends up being a phenomenal success.
What's the screen size of this new iPod versus photos that people carry in their wallets? Or in their purses?
:(
Yes, the iPod would be smaller. But it'd be more convenient, and easier to show *many* photos to someone.
Personally, I like it. I think it's a good idea. Even with the color screen it's battery will last longer then my 3G.
If only the price weren't so damned steep for the color 60GB....
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
I would have to disagree with your assessment of the iPod Photo. First of all, the regular iPod is only $100 cheaper than the iPod Photo, not "half the price." Secondly, you can look at photos on any television, not just on the iPod screen. Thirdly, if your digital camera holds 25,000 photos, I'm sure the memory card alone cost a lot more than $100. And I'm sure your digital camera doesn't automatically sync with your latest pictures, doesn't allow you to make custom albums, doesn't allow you to output slideshows with music, and so on. Say what you want about wanting to save money, but for people who want to carry lots of pictures around with them, paying $100 more is very, very reasonable. And that doesn't even count the full-color album artwork, a clearer screen, and the various other perks of a color iPod.
Museums and galleries have already been using regular iPods as tour guides, example, so with a color screen to display the artwork at the same time, this seems a natural fit.