It’s Showtime: Apple offers Movies, Games and new Nano’s
Every few months Apple fans rush to websites like Engadget.com or Gizmodo.com just to refresh the page. Why are they doing this? They are trying to experience the magic that comes from the new hardware and software updates from Steve Jobs and the good people at Apple. Today’s magic started early this morning. If you launched iTunes to listen to the new Justin Timberlake before going to the office you will have seen that Mac Store was down. The only message posted up was “It’s Showtime” Ss that left us all wondering what Steve Jobs had to say today. And today was no expectation of exciting and new announcements for the iPod line and the iTunes store.
First up Steve Jobs talked about how Apple was currently doing. They are current the #5 seller of music in the and they have sold over 1.5 billion songs from the iTunes store since its launch. Just about anyone who breathes in the country owns an iPod and now Apple has teamed up with car manufactures allowing you to be able to use your iPod in your car. Over 70% of the new cars coming out will have easy iPod hook up features. This isn’t a good sign for the radio as most people listen to the radio in their cars. iPod has also become of the best fitness selling products as of late with its new partnership with Nike. In just 90 over 450,000 unites of the Nike +iPod Sport Kits have been sold.
Steve Jobs kept it rolling with iPod enhancement features. First the screens will be brighter, you be able to search for music via a tiny keyboard like pop-up, and you’ll be able to download games to your iPod. Zuma, Texas Holden, Mini Golf, Cubis 2, PacMan, Tetris! and many more titles will be available from the iTunes store at a cheap price of only $4.99. Now the Nano will come in 5 color as of today and the Nano will now have a 24-hour battery life. 2gb, 4gb, and 8gb Nanos are all on sell now. The Shuffle also got a major update. It now comes in an Aluminum case with clip, 1GB of storage, and all for $79 bucks!
The next major announcement came to the iTunes store and the new version of iTunes 7, which you can download right now. The new iTunes store will now feature high resolution video. Currently video was only encoded at 320×240. But they’ve bumped up the resolution now to 640×480 so you’ll get a nice crisp and clean picture on your iPod w/ Video. iTunes 7 now has MOVIES! But unfortunately Apple doesn’t have major studio support for this effort yet. Only 70 movies are available on iTunes 7 right now and most of them are from Disney owned properties. The most notable movie is Pirates of the Caribbean. Movies will go for $12.99 for a new movie and other movies will be priced at $9.99. Movies will take 30 minutes to download over a broadband connect. Steve Jobs also have a sneek peek at a new Apple product called iTV. The new product will let you enjoy your media on any TV that it’s connected to.
So overall the new announcements from Apple where worth the wait but will everyone go bonkers to wait 30 minutes to download a movie for $12.99? Only time well tell, but Steve Jobs and Apple have been extremely successful over the past years with the introduction of the iPod to the world so if their track record continues we will see Apple get bigger and better over the years to come. And there was a special surprise at the end of the conference when R&B star and 3 time Grammy winner John Legend performed his new single “Save Room.”
