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It was another one of those days today. Apple held one of their religious experiences for their fanbois press events to announce the following:
- A new version of iTunes has hit the streets. It has support for High Definition TV shows and Genius playlists which automatically find similar songs in your collection. It’s available now from www.apple.com/itunes. You’ll need Quicktime 7.5.5 which was also released today along with a Front Row update for Macs.
- A new iPod Nano is available. It’s taller and thinner than the last version. It has a accelerometer to detect tilt, which is clearly used with the “Shake iPod to shuffle” feature. The genius playlist feature is built in to this iPods as well along with an enhanced user interface. The battery lasts 24 hours for music. 4 hours for video and comes in 9 Colors (silver, purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, pink, black) in 8GB and 16GB variants. Check out all the details at www.apple.com/ipodnano
- The other iPod that was announced was the iPod Touch. They’ve changed the casing and have incuded the long rumored iPod Touch/iPhone firmware 2.1 (more on that in a second) as well as support for Nike+iPod. There’s also built-in speaker, volume controls. Get the details at www.apple.com/ipodtouch
- iPod Touch/iPhone firmware 2.1 as mentioned earlier hit the streets today. Changes apparently include significantly better battery life, fewer call drops, the ever popular “bug fixes” and faster backups to iTunes, no application crashes. The iPhone 2.1 firmware will presumably support the same Genius playlist features described in the new iPod Touches and perhaps maybe the Nike+iPod too (although that would require hardware support and I haven’t seen anything on that). Perhaps this will put an end to the lawsuits? The firmware will be relased on Friday via iTunes.
- NBC who had pulled their TV shows from iTunes a high profile falling out with Apple have returned to iTunes. Word on the street is that Apple caved to demands from NBC about the pricing of their shows on iTunes. Oh yeah, the shows are in HD.
- New in-ear headphones are now available as well.
- Finally, the iPod Classic only comes in one variant now. It is now available with 120GB of storage. The 80GB & 160GB versions have been discontinued.
The markets didn’t like this news. Apple stock is down by 4% as I write this. But as you can see here and here, the fanbois are talking about the new offerings from “The Steve.”
UPDATE: A Video of the event is now available.