A thin but healthy looking Steve Jobs on Tuesday unveils at Apple’s ‘Lets Rock’ event iTunes 8, iPod Classic update, new fourth generation iPod nano, new second generation iPod touch and iPhone 2.1 software. These announcements are ‘underwhelming’ as there are no real surprises, and the spy shots of the new iPod nano prior to the launch is spot on. Let’s summarize the highlights from what Jobs called a ‘music’ event:
Apple’s iTunes numbers: over 8.5 million songs, over 125,000 podcasts, over 30,000 TV shows, over 2600 movies, over 3,000 iPhone/iPod touch apps. And 65 million customers.
iTunes to have high-definition TV shows. HD content costs $2.99 per episode while the standard definition is $1.99.
NBC is coming back to iTunes, say hello to “The Office”, “Monk”, “Battlestar Galactica” etc. iTunes stopped selling NBC TV shows end Aug 2007 following NBC’s decision to not renew agreement with Apple then.
In an unprecedented move, Oscar winning director Michael Moore (”Bowling for Columbine”,”Fahrenheit 9/11″,”Sicko”) will release his new film “Slacker Uprising” free and online. It will be available beginning September 23 for three weeks as a free download to North American residents. After which a DVD will be released on October 7. Sign up at SlackerUprising.com to receive download instructions.
The 97-minute long “Slacker Uprising” is a documentary on Moore’s 62-city tour during the 2004 election to rally the young to vote. Moore said “Slacker Uprising” cost about $2 million to make and that about $1 million is out of his pocket. The download is offered by BlipTV and will be high-resolution and far better than YouTube quality.
“I thought it’d be a nice way to celebrate my 20th year of doing this,” Moore said. “And also help get out the vote for November. I’ve been thinking about what I want to do to help with the election this year.”
Moore offers the movie for free as a symbol of gratitude to his fans and also to celebrate his 20th anniversary in film making. Moore hopes “Slacker Uprising” will help spur young people to vote this November. Moore last week released a paperback book called “Mike’s Election Guide 2008″.
Great news for iPhone and iPod touch owners. EA will release Spore Origins on September 7, the same day Spore hits the Mac and PC. Spore Origins is a scale down Spore game build specially for Apple’s app platform. The game was first demo in March when Apple introduced the iPhone software development kit to developers.
Spore Origins looks a lot like Spore’s Cell phase. It also contains a mini version of the Creature Creator software. Spore Origins is available via the usual Apple App Store.
Microsoft aired the first commercial on Thursday of its new Windows branding campaign, with comedian Jerry Seinfeld chance meeting Bill Gates shopping for leather shoe at ‘Shoe Circus’. There is no words of ‘computer’,'Windows’ or ’software’ in the ad. Did you ‘get’ the new ad? Apparently many didn’t as Microsoft officials were calling reporters to explain it.
Microsoft vice president Bill Veghte who is responsible for the $300 million campaign said that the first ad is meant to restart a conversation with consumers. The campaign aims to tell the story of Windows, the story of “how Windows enables a billion people around the globe to do more with their lives today”, and “to re-ignite consumer excitement about the broader value of Windows”. Subsequent ads in the series will focus more on Windows itself, he said.
The eagerly awaited Spore is hitting US store coming September 9. Created by the inventor of “The Sims” Will Wright, Spore looks set to be another masterpiece.
Spore does not fit nicely into any video game genre. It has real-time strategy elements and is also a life simulation game. Spore allows the player to create, design and develop own species of creature, starting at Cell level as a microscopic organism. The player then evolves the cell into the Creature phase and becomes a full blown living creature. Tribal is the next level of the game where the creature becomes social and the game focuses on the species as a group. The Civilization phase is when the creature becomes an intelligent being, and the goal is to gain control of the planet. The final level is the Space phase where the creature interacts with species across the galaxy from other planets.
If you are getting the “massively single-player online game” for the Mac, please note the minimum requirement. The game will not run on PowerPC Mac, Mac Minis or pre-2008 MacBooks:
Intel Core Duo Processor
Leopard Mac OS X 10.5.3 or higher
4.7GB Hard disk space
1GB Ram
ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel GMA X3100
Spore is developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. It will be released on Mac, PC (Windows), DS, iPhone and mobile, with plans for other game consoles and platforms in the future. Beside the game only standard edition, Electronic Arts is making available a Spore Galatic Edition which includes the additional ‘Making of Spore’ DVD video, ‘How to Build a Better Being’ DVD video by National Geographic Channel, ‘The Art of Spore’ hardback mini-book, fold-out Spore poster and a premium 100-page Galactic Handbook.
Apple has sent out invites to its “Let’s Rock” Special Event on next Tuesday September 9. The place is Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco at 10am Pacific Time.
The invite features an iPod silhouette, suggesting that it will be an iPod event. Apple is expected by the rumor mill to launch new iPod nano and iPod touch.
Google made a big Labour Day announcement that it would launch a beta version of its Google Chrome web browser in more than 100 countries today. As of this writing, it is not yet available for download, but Google has published a 38 pages Google Chrome Comic Book to illustrate its features.
Launching a new web browser in a crowded market with MS Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera would be disaster for other company, but not so for Google. “Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.”, Google said in its blog post for the announcement.
Apple iPhone 3G is a popular and magnificent phone, for its market breaking user interface and ease of use. But if you compare iPhone 3G with the other smartphones, you find many features are obvious omissions. Many people have come to expect iPhone 3G to be feature-laden, however Apple has omitted features that are common nowadays, either because the iPhone software is not as developed yet, or it is design decision to keep the phone’s ease of use appeal.
Apple has made clear that iPhone 3G new features will be rolled out via future firmware updates. New iPhone firmware release has become as anticipated as new Apple product launches, and the next update iPhone 2.1 software is expected in September.
We list below 19 missing features of iPhone 3G, features that we come to expect. Some are hardware specifics that are not possible via firmware upgrade, some are feature requests, some are features you can get now via third party applications, and some features are best left out of iPhone 3G.
YouTube has added closed captioning feature, allowing video producers and uploaders to add captions and subtitles in over 120 languages. This feature also has the potential to allow YouTube to embed ads into videos.
If a video includes captions, viewers can activate them by clicking the caption button located on the bottom right of the video player. Clicking this button will allow viewers to choose which captions they want to see, especially for video with multiple captions. For now caption does not work with embedded YouTube video, you can only access captions when playing videos on YouTube website.
“You can add captions to one of your videos by uploading a closed caption file using the “Captions and Subtitles” menu on the editing page. To add several captions to a video, simply upload multiple files. If you want to include foreign subtitles in multiple languages, upload a separate file for each language.” - The YouTube Team
The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) announced that Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Sony’s Sir Howard Stringer and Ford’s Alan Mulally will deliver keynote addresses at the 2009 International CES, the world’s largest consumer technology tradeshow scheduled for January 8-11, 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
“These exciting keynote speakers demonstrate that the 2009 International CES is the hub of activity in the consumer electronics, entertainment content, and automotive industries,” said CEA President and CEO Gary Shapiro. “Steve Ballmer and Sir Howard Stringer are driving forces behind the continued growth of the consumer technology industry. Alan Mulally is a true visionary spurring technology innovation in the automotive market. These leaders are changing the way technology is being incorporated into new markets, and CES attendees will all benefit from these keynotes unveiling the next generation of technology.”
