award tour

Apple’s new stuff today includes a subnotebook called the MacBook Air which is thin enought to fit in a manilla envelope and weighs 3 pounds. Cool stuff includes a multi-touch mousepad and an optional solid-state hard drive. Bad stuff includes only 1 USB port, no firewire, and no optical drive. Also released Time Capsule, which is just the Airport Extreme 802.11n wireless base with a 500GB or 1TB hard drive. And there’s a new AppleTV with a new UI and the iTunes store now has movie rentals including rentals in HD. I wonder how long those will take to download?

Biggest dumbass release is a software upgrade for the iPod touch which costs $20. No joke. I can’t believe they’d actually do that. It’ll piss way too many people off. Here’s the list of features. The iPhone got the same add-ons plus some cool stuff like auto map-location from cell-tower triangulation and sms to multiple people.

Apple also struck an interesting business deal with Fox which will now ship DVDs with copies of the movies already encoded for use on your iPod and for no extra charge.

Other interesting info, Apple has sold 4 million iPhones to date and 5 million copies of Leopard in 3 months. Considering there’s only 25 million OSX clients in the world, that ain’t bad.

Microsoft’s second generation Zune is due out in 10 days. You can see photos and specs at Zune.net. And isn’t it crazy that Microsoft couldn’t get zune.com? And an additional side-note on that site, what is up with the orange links on the brown text? It’s genuinely hard to read on my screen.

But that’s beside the point. I actually got to use a new Zune the other day and was actually pretty impressed. Not so much that I’d buy one (not that they even work with Macs) but you get the point. The one thing I thought worth mentioning is how the main navigation button works. It allows you to scroll up and down in three different ways:

• Click it in a direction like a mouse button and it moves up or down by one item.
• Hold down and it scrolls continuously.
• Or slide your finger down the navigation and the menu will scroll and eventually slow down. You can also tap it to stop sliding at any point

I think this might actually work better than the iPod’s circular scroll wheel. Lately I’ve found that moving up or down just one item on my iPod can be particularly frustrating. This is especially so if you’re doing moving around (like walking somewhere) or can’t focus on the screen (like driving). The Zune’s nav button addresses this simple case.

I only got to use it for a couple minutes but the only other thing that struck me is that the font it uses is narrow which made it slightly hard to read. It’s definitely not as nice as the fonts used on the latest iPods (Myriad and Helvetica).

Another plus for the Zune, the weird-ass acid-trip ad campaign they’re currently doing features a Rogue Wave track.

So I’ve had my iPod for almost 4 months now and here’s what I’ve found:

• I listen to music every day on my commute to and from work. It now drives me crazy to ride the bus without it
• I can’t stand how you can’t shuffle on a specific playlist
• I’ve only used up about 25 of the 60 Gigs on my iPod. I have a lot of music which I decided wasn’t worth the effort of fixing their ID3 tags
• The battery is holding up pretty well. I probably recharge it once a week after completely killing the battery.
• I’ve never used the calendar, stopwatch, contacts, clock, or games on my ipod
• I copied all my photos on to my iPod but have never really looked at them
• I’ve used “notes” once. I put the san francisco subway schedule on it for the weekend I went down there. In the end, I never looked at it
• Yesterday was the first day I put the video functionality to actual use. The iTunes music store has a free download of Psych’s pilot episode and the season opener for 30 days (which is really worth watching). This has made the bus ride go by incredibly fast (and makes the battery go incredibly fast too).

Sorry to all about the less frequent updates in the last week. After a quick triage last night my bloglines is still well over 200 posts. Anyways, as one could imagine, I spent about 5 hours yesterday copying music on to my shiny new ipod. The majority of the time was spent waiting on file transfers from cds. To my suprise, I only got to about 12 gigs of music yesterday. I still have lots more to go through but I think I’ll easily come in under 20 gigs. Is it possible I only really needed a 30 gig ipod? I haven’t put my photos or any videos on the ipod yet. Still some thing I want to do:

• copy over all my photos
• hook up a couple podcasts (like cbcRadio3 and kexp’s song of the day)
• find some tool to photocast flickr galleries (like ram’s)
• buy a $25 piece of plastic. god bless america!