Apple's iPod refresh: What you need to know
The new iPod Nano will come in two versions, one 8GB ($149), and one 16GB ($179). That represents a $20 price cut on the high end. The system software also makes use of some of the added features in iTunes 9, like Genius Mixes. And it's inherited the VoiceOver control from its siblings, the iPod Shuffle and Touch.The buttonless iPod Shuffle remains, though there are new colors, capacities and a lower entry price. The new 2GB flavor, which is available in five colors, runs $59, along with the same colors in a 4GB version that costs $79. There's also a $99, 4GB "special edition" that's made of polished stainless steel and currently available only at Apple's online and retail stores. The low end of the iPod Touch line got price cuts, and the device got capacity bumps on the higher end. The 8GB model is now $199, down from $229. Meanwhile, the 16GB model has been shelved in favor of a 32GB version, which costs $299. At the high end, users can now get a 64GB model, which runs $399. Both the 32GB and 64GB models are packing faster internals, similar if not the same to the recently released iPhone 3GS, and are now capable of OpenGL ES 2.0 which boosts 3D performance.The iPod Classic remains untouched in features and price, although the capacity has been bumped from 120GB to 160GB.New softwareiPhone/iPod OS 3.1Apple announced the release Wednesday of OS 3.1, which will be a free update to both iPhone and iPod Touch owners. With 3.1, users on both platforms can now get Genius recommendations for applications they've purchased. These show up in the App Store app, as well as in iTunes, and function in a similar fashion to Genius for music. It takes your purchase information and sends it to Apple, which will analyze it for similar purchases, and offer up recommendations. This may end up being a more precise system since there are fewer apps than music tracks. 3.1 also adds a new security feature for iPhone owners--the capability to lock down the device over the air using MobileMe. Previously, if your phone was lost or stolen, this feature would only be enabled if the user had set it that way.iTunes 9Apple introduced a new version of iTunes, which offers iPhone and iPod Touch users a way to better organize applications they have added to the device. Users can now drag and drop apps to multiple home screens at once, instead of doing so on the device itself. iPhone and iPod Touch users can now rearrange apps on their home screen right in iTunes, instead of on the device itself.AppleAnother new feature in iTunes 9 that users in households are sure to enjoy is something called Home Sharing. This lets you automatically sync purchases across multiple computers within a household. This means they don't have to be redownloaded, or transferred from portable devices, which can save time if you're in a hurry. The Genius feature and DJ feature have been mashed together to create something called Genius Mixes. The software can create multiple stations of music without the user having to pick a song for it to start from. The software also has a new purchase-centric feature called iTunes LP, that adds a handful of digital pack-ins to purchased albums such as liner notes, photos, videos, lyrics, and links to online resources. This confirmed rumors Apple had been cooking up such a feature going back earlier this year.In the same vein of iTunes LP, there's iTunes Extras--basically repackaged bonus features from movies and TV shows. This aims to add a little more value to rented and purchased video content, and steer customers toward Apple's store instead of some of the competition.Other tidbits• Apple is now offering 30,000 ready-made ringtones for $1.29 a pop. These come from all four major labels, and differ from the current system, which allows you to make your own ringtone from any song you've purchased from the store for a fee of 99 cents. The new system cuts out the need to even buy the song. This content is rated TV-MA, and is for viewers 18 years or older. Are you of age?YesNoSorry, you are not old enough to view this content.Play• Apple has sold 30 million iPhones since the launch of the device.• More than 20 million iPod Touches have been sold.• More than 100 million iPod Nanos have been sold.• Users have downloaded 1.8 billion apps from a catalog of more than 75,000.• Apple has 100 million registered iTunes users.• Users have submitted more than 27 million music libraries to contribute to the Genius feature, totaling 54 billion songs. • iPhone developer Tapulous demonstrated an upcoming title called Riddim Ribbon that lets players race on their own music tracks. Looks quite similar to PC title Audiosurf.• EA demonstrated Madden 10 which uses virtual, onscreen controls.• Gameloft has had 20 million game downloads. The company demonstrated a new first-person shooter game called Nova that's reminiscent of Halo. Correction: This post initially included some incorrect pricing information. The OS 3.1 update only costs money for those who had not yet upgraded to 3.0 or higher. Also, the iPod Shuffle price cut refers to the 2GB model.Related storiesVideo: Jobs, new iPods take the Apple stagePhotos: Apple event high notes
New app Chorus helps you find, share iPhone apps
New app Chorus helps you find, share iPhone apps
Once you've shared your application history with Chorus, it helps fuel what the service recommends to you--just like Apple does with its own Genius service. This is where the app goes one step further though; it lets you see which of those apps your friends have used, if they've rated it, and whether they ended up removing it from their device. It also weights its recommendations higher if your friends have it installed.To befriend other users you can cull your Facebook or Twitter contact list to find those who may already be using the service, or search by whatever username they've using on Chorus. The app also comes installed with a handful of subscriptions to the service's "AppMavens" who are bloggers that seed the network with their picks and reviews. Frankly, I found these the AppMaven's reviews less useful than the App Store's user review section, which--major faults aside, can shed light on things a single review can't, like how well it works on various devices, if there are any bugs, and what version the app was reviewed on. Chorus recommends apps your friends have used and downloaded, as well as showing you how they reviewed them.CNETThe saving grace with the Chorus reviews system is that like other third-party app directories, all purchases still go through in the App Store app itself, which means you can still scope out those user reviews before making a purchase. On the downside, when it comes time to buy, you get kicked out of the Chorus app and sent into the App Store. This can be jarring but is made slightly less irritating by the fact that the app is smart enough to remember what you were doing the last time you were using it and bringing you back upon a relaunch. All in all Chorus is a useful tool for discovering apps that should become increasingly useful if more people seed it with recommendations. Though there are a few things I'd like to see in future versions, the first of which is a way to manage purchases and do app discovery from the Web and not just on the device--something the company says will be coming at a later date. Another is a way to queue up apps you want to purchase, then e-mail yourself that list in the form of iTunes links. This would let you continue to use the tool without interruption, and facilitate batch purchasing. I'd also like to see recommendations of people to follow based on my download and/or usage history since that would help me whittle down who I'd actually spend time paying attention to. This, or some sort of visual relevancy indicator about how much of a match any given app is to my buying habits would go a long way towards making me, and likely others feel better about clicking through to see more about that app.See also: App Gems, App Connect and AppVee (all of which open up in iTunes), as well as site AppShopper.com.
Once you've shared your application history with Chorus, it helps fuel what the service recommends to you--just like Apple does with its own Genius service. This is where the app goes one step further though; it lets you see which of those apps your friends have used, if they've rated it, and whether they ended up removing it from their device. It also weights its recommendations higher if your friends have it installed.To befriend other users you can cull your Facebook or Twitter contact list to find those who may already be using the service, or search by whatever username they've using on Chorus. The app also comes installed with a handful of subscriptions to the service's "AppMavens" who are bloggers that seed the network with their picks and reviews. Frankly, I found these the AppMaven's reviews less useful than the App Store's user review section, which--major faults aside, can shed light on things a single review can't, like how well it works on various devices, if there are any bugs, and what version the app was reviewed on. Chorus recommends apps your friends have used and downloaded, as well as showing you how they reviewed them.CNETThe saving grace with the Chorus reviews system is that like other third-party app directories, all purchases still go through in the App Store app itself, which means you can still scope out those user reviews before making a purchase. On the downside, when it comes time to buy, you get kicked out of the Chorus app and sent into the App Store. This can be jarring but is made slightly less irritating by the fact that the app is smart enough to remember what you were doing the last time you were using it and bringing you back upon a relaunch. All in all Chorus is a useful tool for discovering apps that should become increasingly useful if more people seed it with recommendations. Though there are a few things I'd like to see in future versions, the first of which is a way to manage purchases and do app discovery from the Web and not just on the device--something the company says will be coming at a later date. Another is a way to queue up apps you want to purchase, then e-mail yourself that list in the form of iTunes links. This would let you continue to use the tool without interruption, and facilitate batch purchasing. I'd also like to see recommendations of people to follow based on my download and/or usage history since that would help me whittle down who I'd actually spend time paying attention to. This, or some sort of visual relevancy indicator about how much of a match any given app is to my buying habits would go a long way towards making me, and likely others feel better about clicking through to see more about that app.See also: App Gems, App Connect and AppVee (all of which open up in iTunes), as well as site AppShopper.com.
Bitcasa moves your hard drive to the cloud
Bitcasa moves your hard drive to the cloud
One of the most technically audacious companies I've seen announced itself at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference yesterday: Bitcasa. Technically, it's a virtualized primary storage company. With this product, your main storage is actually in the "cloud," and because of that, it's pretty much unlimited. Your local hard drive is used--heavily--for the cache. If the technology works, this architecture should give you storage that's just as fast as a local-only hard drive, but with more capacity and reliability. Bitcasa will cost $10 a month with no storage cap for users. (A free version will be "less than unlimited," the company says).Readers who follow me know how much I'm a fan of apps and services that synchronize local storage to the cloud, so they won't be surprised that I really like this idea. With Bitcasa, in concept anyway, users no longer have to worry about a single local hard-drive failure eating their data, since everything is mirrored on the Internet. Users also get all their data on all their devices, and every time you get a new computer, you just point it to your account and all your data appears on your local device. Whether it's actually there is another matter, but if Bitcasa is fast and smart enough, you'll never know nor care.CEO Tony Gauda confirmed for me that there are some large challenges to bringing a product like this to market. Security is one. Bitcasa encrypts everything end to end and in the cloud, so absent a password hack, the data can't leave the system. Even if the network is secure, though, there's the perception that it may not be; Dropbox's June security flop still weighs on this sector.Also, as Gauda says, "We can't make single-user products multiuser."So if you use a Bitcasa drive for an app like Outlook or iTunes, and try to access that file from multiple computers at once, you might have problems. Bitcasa lets you share your files among your computers, or with friends and co-workers.But more importantly, there's the fact that consumers are actually moving to more native Web apps, like Google Docs, Yahoo Mail, and Flickr, not to mention smartphones and tablets that often don't have user-accessible file systems. So while Bitcasa is cool and useful, I do wonder how long that will be the case.Gauda says that, actually, the company is working on technology to help Web app developers shunt data between services, again using the Bitcasa "drive" as a consumer's main storage space.There are also big competitors to worry about: The mythical GDrive, for example, and Apple's imminent iCloud storage product. But, Gauda says, nobody is going to offer what he's doing. Apple's iCloud will be, at best, an online mirror of your local storage, with limits. Bitcasa will be unlimited. "We want the hard drive you just bought to be the last one you need."Gauda says he can make this business work at $10 a month with unlimited storage. The company is aggressive about data de-duplication, and furthermore, most users have less than 25GB of data. With cheap bandwidth and cheap storage, it works. The 8-person company has raised $1.3 million and counts Andreessen Horowitz and the CrunchFund as its backers.The product should be out "in a couple of months" for OS X first, and then Windows. There will be a quick way to "cloudify" any directory, except your boot files, Gauda says.I'm excited about this product, but like many users I think, I'll be scared to use it at first.
One of the most technically audacious companies I've seen announced itself at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference yesterday: Bitcasa. Technically, it's a virtualized primary storage company. With this product, your main storage is actually in the "cloud," and because of that, it's pretty much unlimited. Your local hard drive is used--heavily--for the cache. If the technology works, this architecture should give you storage that's just as fast as a local-only hard drive, but with more capacity and reliability. Bitcasa will cost $10 a month with no storage cap for users. (A free version will be "less than unlimited," the company says).Readers who follow me know how much I'm a fan of apps and services that synchronize local storage to the cloud, so they won't be surprised that I really like this idea. With Bitcasa, in concept anyway, users no longer have to worry about a single local hard-drive failure eating their data, since everything is mirrored on the Internet. Users also get all their data on all their devices, and every time you get a new computer, you just point it to your account and all your data appears on your local device. Whether it's actually there is another matter, but if Bitcasa is fast and smart enough, you'll never know nor care.CEO Tony Gauda confirmed for me that there are some large challenges to bringing a product like this to market. Security is one. Bitcasa encrypts everything end to end and in the cloud, so absent a password hack, the data can't leave the system. Even if the network is secure, though, there's the perception that it may not be; Dropbox's June security flop still weighs on this sector.Also, as Gauda says, "We can't make single-user products multiuser."So if you use a Bitcasa drive for an app like Outlook or iTunes, and try to access that file from multiple computers at once, you might have problems. Bitcasa lets you share your files among your computers, or with friends and co-workers.But more importantly, there's the fact that consumers are actually moving to more native Web apps, like Google Docs, Yahoo Mail, and Flickr, not to mention smartphones and tablets that often don't have user-accessible file systems. So while Bitcasa is cool and useful, I do wonder how long that will be the case.Gauda says that, actually, the company is working on technology to help Web app developers shunt data between services, again using the Bitcasa "drive" as a consumer's main storage space.There are also big competitors to worry about: The mythical GDrive, for example, and Apple's imminent iCloud storage product. But, Gauda says, nobody is going to offer what he's doing. Apple's iCloud will be, at best, an online mirror of your local storage, with limits. Bitcasa will be unlimited. "We want the hard drive you just bought to be the last one you need."Gauda says he can make this business work at $10 a month with unlimited storage. The company is aggressive about data de-duplication, and furthermore, most users have less than 25GB of data. With cheap bandwidth and cheap storage, it works. The 8-person company has raised $1.3 million and counts Andreessen Horowitz and the CrunchFund as its backers.The product should be out "in a couple of months" for OS X first, and then Windows. There will be a quick way to "cloudify" any directory, except your boot files, Gauda says.I'm excited about this product, but like many users I think, I'll be scared to use it at first.
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