jeremy borger [blog]

Apple revamps iPod lineup

Some major iPod/iPhone news coming out of Apple today…

First, Apple is offering customized ringtones for the iPhone. Certain songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store (which I think they should rename the iTunes Media Store) will allow you to select a portion of the song to convert into a ringtone for an additional 99 cents. Now some people may be upset that this functionality costs an ADDITIONAL 99 cents on top of the 99 cents you already paid for the song. I tend to agree. I mean, you’ve already bought the song, why can’t you just have it play when someone calls? But, this is probably more of a record label thing than an Apple thing. Plus, many other cell phone providers give you crappy ring tone songs that cost $2.49 each, and that’s just for the ring tone, not the song itself.

The iPod Shuffle ($80) now comes in five colors. Yippie!

The new iPod Nano ($150 for 4GB/1,000 songs or $200 for 8GB/2,000 songs) looks like someone squished it down to make it shorter, but wider. It has a widescreen display and comes in five metallic covers. You can now browse by album cover and play games on it. And the display makes it better for playing movies. (although at 2 inches diagonal, that’s one small screen!)

The regular iPod is now being called the “iPod Classic” ($250 for 80GB and $350 for 160GB - that’s 40,000 songs, people…) and, like the iPod Shuffle and iPod Nano, features a metallic enclosure. Unlike the Nano and Shuffle, it comes in just two colors - silver and black.

But the coolest new iPod is the iPod Touch ($300 for 8GB, $400 for 16GB). It looks just like the iPhone without an earpiece. And it works just like the iPhone, except without the phone functions. It DOES have WiFi wireless Internet, so if you’re in a WiFi hotspot, you can access the Internet with Safari, just like an iPhone. Contacts, calendar, YouTube, etc… It’s all there.

But a complaint many people had with the iPhone was that you couldn’t buy songs directly through the phone. That changed on Wednesday. Both the iPhone and the new iPhone Touch feature the iTunes WiFi Music Store (should be called the Media Store…) that will allow you to purchase songs and videos DIRECTLY from the device without having to sync it to a computer. When you do connect your iPhone/iPod back to your Mac or PC, any songs you may have downloaded will be copied to your computer. Sweet!

This is the first portable music device that allows you to do this. Microsoft’s Zune has a WiFi card as well, but it’s only used to share song between Zune’s, not purchase them over the Internet.

But wait, there’s more! Apple also announced a partnership with Starbucks. Anytime you walk into a Starbucks, a Starbucks icon will appear in the iTunes Music Store. This section of the store will show you what song is currently playing in that Starbucks, along with the last 10 songs to have played in that Starbucks, and allow you to purchase any of them. Awesome.

However, the rollout to all Starbucks locations won’t happen overnight. The transformation won’t be complete until 2009.

Apple also dropped the price of the 8GB iPhone by $200 — from $600 to $400. Now, most people know that when you buy a piece of technology, price drops are expected. But it usually doesn’t happen this quickly — a 33 percent drop in two months. Some have speculated that this means Apple is not selling the iPhone as quickly as they had hoped. But it was the best selling smartphone in July. Apple will have shipped over 1 million iPhones by the end of September. So why the price break? I honestly think they’re just trying to use momentum to grab as much marketshare as they can by the end of the year. And this is a good way to do it.

So lots of great news coming out of Apple. I’m still waiting until next summer to get an iPhone. But there might be a new iPod of some sort in my future before Christmas since I’m still using a black and white iPod Mini.