Hasta La Gadget!

Apple is likely introducing a family of new iPods (and maybe a revamped Apple TV) today at its annual music event in San Francisco.

The press conference kicks off 10 a.m. PT at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where CEO Steve Jobs traditionally takes the stage to unveil his company’s latest creations.

In a surprise move that may offer a hint of what’s to come, Apple said it will be live streaming its event using “Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards.” But you’ll have to be an Apple customer to view the broadcast: Viewing requires a Mac running Snow Leopard, or an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad running iOS 3.0 or higher. (Mac and Windows users with the VLC media player may be able to view the live stream, with some limitations, MacRumors reports.)

Live streaming a press conference, while routine for most companies, is a first for Apple and Steve Jobs, whose mastery of the stage has transformed a dull staple of PR — product announcements — into an event of rock star proportions. It may also hint at streaming-media products to be announced at the event.

This time around, multiple independent rumor reports and a few pieces of evidence hint at major upgrades for the iPod Touch, iPod Nano and Apple TV. We also expect some major software updates for iTunes and the iPad (iOS 4), which may include cloud-based media storage and the ability to stream videos on demand. For a full summary on what to expect, read Wired.com’s list of predictions.

Yours truly will be live blogging today’s event with photography by Wired.com’s Jon Snyder and live tweet updates by Mark McClusky (@markmcc). Refresh this post for live updates as the event unravels. If you prefer video, catch Apple’s live video stream of the keynote.

Scroll down or click for the latest live blog updates.

Photo: Jon Snyder / Wired.com

See Also:

• Prediction Roundup: New iPods, Apple TV Expected This Week …
• A Tale of Two iPods: Why the Touch Has No Camera
• Leaked Cases Reveal New iPod Designs

Live Blog Updates

11:20 a.m. So that’s the end of the show. Stay tuned for our hands-on with Apple TV and the new iPods.

11:15 a.m. Chris Martin is now playing “Viva La Vida.”

11:12 a.m. It’s basically over. Aw, this is such a classic song. I haven’t listened to it in ages.

11:12 a.m. Wow. Chris Martin from Coldplay is here and on stage. He’s playing “Yellow.”

11:10 a.m. A new iTunes and iTunes Ping – a social network for music. “We think this is going to be really popular very fast.” Apple TV – a “phenomenal new way” to watch TV shows in your living room whenever you want.

11:09 a.m. Steve’s reviewing everything we’ve gone over today–Shuffle, iPod Nano, iPod Touch. No iPod Classic, notably.

11:08 a.m. Apple TV will be shipping in four weeks and you can pre-order today.

11:07 a.m. Apple TV costs just $99. Used to cost $230.

11:06 a.m. So the iPad is basically a remote for the Apple TV. Neat. You’ll be able to watch a movie, walk into the living room and watch it right there on your Apple TV.

11.06 a.m. On the iPad he launches the video player and chooses the Pixar movie Up. While he’s playing it, using the volume control on the iPad he can push it and stream it to the Apple TV.

11:06 a.m. Now Steve’s showing a slide from his presentation. The slide has an iPad and an Apple TV.

11:05 a.m. Steve’s showing a slideshow of photos. Music in the background, the photos pop up with fancy transitions.

11:03 a.m. Steve’s watching Glee. On the internet you’ve got built-in Netflix. Go into instant queue and you can watch all the stuff you’ve queued up in Netflix.

11:03 a.m. Apple TV interface is somewhat similar to iOS. Grab a title you want to rent and the icon jiggles.

11:02 a.m. Steve’s showing Iron Man 2. It looks really clear. He skips forward halfway into the movie and it’s still streaming fine.

11:00 a.m. Steve’s demonstrating movie rentals. You can see Rotten Tomato ratings and stuff. Click rent and hit OK and in a few seconds you are ready to start watching.

10:57 a.m. If you’re a Netflix subscriber you can stream content from Netflix’s streaming library. You can also watch anything you want on YouTube and see photos on Flickr, and videos and photos on MobileMe.

10:56 a.m. These HD shows are commercial-free as well. This is a big step for studios to make and not all of them have gotten on yet. So right now they’ve got ABC and FOX –just like The Wall Street Journal reported earlier.

10:56 a.m. The price used to be $3 for HD TV shows to buy them. Now you can rent HD TV shows for 99 cents.

10:56 a.m. You can rent first-run HD movies for $5 – the day and date they come out on DVD. This is a big deal, before there were lengthy time windows for iTunes movies.

10:55 a.m. You stream content from your computer if you want it – photos, videos, music. No syncing required. You can stream photo slideshows, too. And it’s “silent, cool and tiny.”

10:55 a.m. Apple has gone to the rental model, no more purchases. You rent everything.

10:55 a.m. With new Apple TV, you plug in two cables, power the HDMI. It’s got a really simple remote.

10:54 a.m. You can hold it in the palm of your hand. It’s got HDMI, a power supply built in it, optical audio, Ethernet
And it’s got Wi-Fi.

10:53 a.m. The new Apple TV is a puny little square that is a 1/4 of the size of the current Apple TV

10:52 a.m. Consumers don’t want to sync to a computer. “Most of them haven’t even figured out what that is. They don’t want that syncing stuff, it’s too complicated,” says Steve. And users want whatever hardware they have to be silent, cool and small.

10:51 a.m. Steve says Apple has learned a lot. People want Hollywood movies and TV shows whenever they want them. They want professional content, and everything in HD. They’d like to pay lower prices for content. They don’t want a computer on their TV, don’t want to manage storage.

10:50 a.m. We’re talking about Apple TV. “Nothing’s really hit in the living room yet. We’ve talked to people who’ve used Apple TVs and they love them. They absolutely love them and use them a lot,” he says.

10:50 a.m. “Actually it’s one more hobby,” says Steve.

10:50 a.m. iTunes 10 is available for download today. Now we’re moving on to one more thing.

10:49 a.m. Ping is available also on your iPhone and iPod Touch, right in the iTunes Store. There’s a new button popping up right on your phone or your iPod where you get your activity.

10:48 a.m. Steve’s showing his own Ping account. I doubt it will be public.

10:46 a.m. He’s showing Katie Cotton’s Ping account. Katie Cotton is Apple’s head PR woman. Hah! There’s a video playing of Lady Gaga talking about Ping. No wonder there were photos of Lady Gaga visiting Apple recently.

10:45 a.m. Now a demo of Ping–the social network for music. They are showing the new “hybrid view” with album art. Also showing friends posting concert photos, songs, album review. You can preview songs then buy it if you want to.

10:43 a.m. You can customize settings to require approval of who’s following you if you want. You can be as private or as public as you want. “Super simple to set up,” says Steve.

10:41 a.m. So Ping is sort of like Last.FM, but stuffed into iTunes. You get a custom top-10 chart that’s customized based on what people you follow are downloading from iTunes.

10:40 a.m. iTunes 10: Introducing Ping. It’s a social network for music. “It’s sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes,” he says. You can follow your favorite artists and friends and discover what music they’re talking about, listening to and downloading.

10:39 a.m. There’s a new hybrid view where if you have more than five songs from the same album, it breaks out the view to show the album artwork with the album. So far it looks mostly the same but it will be very important if it’s going in the cloud.

10:38 a.m. Now they’re launching iTunes 10. I was hoping it’d get a new name, but oh well. Steve says he’s ditching the CD in the logo since it looks like iTunes is surpassing CD sales next spring. It’s just a blue bubble with a music note.

10:37 a.m. 11.7 billion songs have been downloaded through iTunes. 450 million TV episodes, 100 million movies, 35 million books. And there are over 160 million accounts with credit cards and one-click payments.

10:37 a.m. Now we’re moving on to iTunes.

10:35 a.m. Nope.. it’s not Apple TV. He’s showing a new ad for the iPods.

10:35 a.m. OK, is it time for the Apple TV? Let’s see…

10.34 a.m. The iPod Touch also has a high resolution camera just like the iPhone 4. It’s for shooting photos and HD video, and not just Facetime.

10:34 a.m. New iPod Touch is basically the same as the iPhone 4 but without the phone. And it’s thinner.

10:33 a.m. iPod Touch also has the A4 chip, the three axis gyroscope, iOS 4.1 with Game Center and a front-facing camera with FaceTime.

10:32 a.m. The new iPod Touch is even thinner. It has the retina display – the 326 ppi 24-bit color LED screen, just like the iPhone 4.

10:31 a.m. iPod Touch is the most popular iPod. It’s the #1 portable game player in the world, Steve says. Outsells Nintendo and Sony portable gameplayers combined. 50% marketshare both US and worldwide. “It has become by far the most popular portable game player in the world,” he says. 1.5 billion games and entertainment downloads.

10.30 a.m. Now we’re moving on to the iPod Touch.

10:30 a.m. It sells for $149 in the 8 GBversion and $179 in the 6 GB version.

10:29 a.m. Steve’s launched the photos app and he’s flicking back and forth between shots. It comes in seven colors. Guess there’s no Wi-Fi — oh well.

10:29 a.m. Steve’s launched the photos app and he’s flicking back and forth between shots.

10:28 a.m. If you listen to “Albums” a lot–as opposed to artists or songs–you can choose that shortcut and move it over your home screen. Apps jiggle like when you rearrange them on an iPhone.

10:27 a.m. It has four little apps — like a corner of an iPhone. Steve launches the music player, scrolls to the letter of the artist he’s looking for, picks Ella Fitzgerald and plays a song. (But is there Wi-Fi? That’s the major question.)

10:26 a.m. You’ve got a clock, a built-in FM radio, you can see photos app. Steve’s giving us a demo.

10:25 a.m. The Nano has hard volume buttons, voiceover, FM radio, Nike+ and 24 hours of audio playback.

10.24 a.m. The iPod Nano has been super popular. They’re eliminating the click wheel and making it touch based. It’s now multitouch, a small square touchscreen, just like the rumors said.

10:24 a.m. Now we’re looking at the iPod Nano.

10:23 a.m. The packing looks like a little square dome. It’s going to cost 50 bucks, 2 GB space.

10:22 a.m. The Shuffle has a clip so it’s instantly wearable, and it’s got some playlists. You dictate a playlist to pick it. Genius mixes and VoiceOver, which tells you which playlist it is playing. 15 hours of battery life.

10:21 a.m. Starting off with the iPod Shuffle: the puny belt clip with some simple controls. The current one is button-less, and Steve says people missed the buttons. The new iPod Shuffle is a puny square with buttons and voice control.

10:21 We have new designs for every single model of iPod. “It’s the biggest change in the iPod line ever,” says Steve.

10:20 a.m. Apple has sold 275 million iPods. “One of the secrets to the iPod’s success is that even though the iPod has a very high market share, we’ve never rested on our laurels. Every year we try to improve iPods – make them even better for our users. And this year we’ve gone wild,” says Steve.

10:20 a.m. Now we’re moving on to iPods.

10:19 a.m. iOS 4.2 is coming out November for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Free update. That means the operating system is finally going to be one unified operating system across all the devices, whereas the iPad was an awkward loner for a while.

10:17 a.m. iOS 4.2 on iPad: Steve is showing all the new stuff we’re already familiar with in iOS 4 on other iOS devices. Multitasking, multi-threaded e-mail and folders.

10:16 a.m. Steve’s giving a demo on printing. Simple print option inside a document. Then the Print Center app shows up in the app tray at the bottom of the screen, where you can cancel a print if necessary.

10:15 a.m. Steve is giving us a sneak peek at iOS 4.2 for iPad. It will be coming out later this year and brings everything in iOS 4 to the iPad. The big feature: wireless printing. (Woohoo!)

10:15 a.m. iOS 4.1 will be out for iPhone and iPod Touch next week.

10:13 a.m. Frankly game demos are the most boring part of these Apple pressers. They’re just time fillers before the real news. Thor, the game, is going to be out on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

10:12 a.m. Mike Capps of Epic Games is showing the 3-D world of the Thor medieval game. With Game Center a friend sends an invite and he can accept or decline in the push-notification.

10:11 a.m. Steve’s demonstrating invitations to games – they show up as push notification alerts. (“That won’t be too annoying,” Mark McClusky, Wired magazine editor sitting next to me, says sarcastically.) Mike Capps, president of Epic Games is on stage to demonstrate his game called Thor.

10:10 a.m. Another thing built in is Game Center. Multiplayer games, allows you to challenge friends. If you don’t have any friends it will auto match you with people. You can discover new games, too.

10:08 a.m. High-dynamic range photos: When we take a photo a lot of times there’s a lot of blown out bright light. Now you can take three photos in rapid succession — one normal exposure and one that’s over and one that’s under exposed. Combines these three to produce an HDR photo. We keep the normal photo and HDR photo in the photos app.

10.07 a.m. Steve: “We think we’ve nailed a lot of them and we think you’re going to be pretty happy with them.” Second, there are high dynamic range photos (explanation coming soon.) HD video upload over Wi-Fi, TV show rentals and Game Center is making debut for end users.

10.07 a.m. Today they’re releasing iOS 4.1 — lots of bugs have been fixed. Proximity sensor, Bluetooth, iPhone 3G bugs.

10:07 a.m. 250,000 apps in the store. 25,000 are now iPad apps.

10:06 a.m. 230,000 iOS activations per day, says Steve.

10:05 a.m. Steve wants to talk about iOS, the OS for iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches. “Touch user interfaces were completely different before the iPhone. And mobile applications were completely different before the iPhone,” he says. iOS devices shipped: 120 million. (Audience applauds)

10:04 a.m. Over 1 million people visit their stores some days, compare that to 30,000 people who attended Macworld Expo, Jobs says. It’s clear why they opted out of the show. More than 50 percent of customers are buying their first Mac.

10:03 a.m.
Altogether Apple has 300 Apple Retail Store. Yeesh. In 10 countries – US, Canada, UK , France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, China.

10:02 a.m.
The third big store Apple has opened recently is in London. “Beautiful old building we’ve restore. It’s fantastic.”

10:02 a.m. Steve’s giving us an update on Apple retail stores, the one in Paris looks really pretty. Apple has also recently opened a store in Shanghai, a 40-foot high glass cylinder with a spiral staircase.

10:01 a.m. Steve says his “partner in crime is here today, Steve Wozniak” and invites him to stand up.

10:00 a.m. Steve Jobs is on stage. The audience is applauding. “Woooooooooo!”

9:50 a.m. Just got seated. They’re playing Beatles music. Hmm….will Beatles finally come to iTunes?

9:20 a.m. Press passes are hot pink this time! Snazzy!

Apple got colorful with its media pass for the event. Photo: Brian X. Chen

9:10 am. We’re in line outside the Yerba Buena Center. It’s a beautiful day in downtown San Francisco, and the line is piling up fast. Photographer Jon Snyder, who’s in a separate photographers’ line, texts me: “Gettin’ dizzy. Just saw Woz.”

Most user reviews of the new Kindle 3, especially those with photo spreads, have focused on the newly-available graphite model, but if you really want to see the differences in the hardware, screen quality, and web capabilities in the new model, it may be more useful to put the two white models head-to-head.

That’s just what Andrys Basten did at her blog A Kindle World. They might be the first user photos of the white Kindle 3 online (I haven’t been able to find any earlier ones).

Also, if you pay close attention, there are terrific user tips for Kindle 3 users embodied in these photos. I’ve been really impressed by the new WebKit browser, but found full-sized web sites harder to navigate than their mobile versions. When I saw Basten’s pictures, I said, “Oh, put the NYT in landscape, not portrait! That’s genius!”

There are a few dumb things the Kindle’s web browser can’t do. Clicking on a link that tries to force you to open a new window just gets you a “this web browser does not support multiple windows” message. You can easily edit titles of bookmarks but not URLs. Drop-down menus sometimes just fool the browser altogether.

And to get to the web browser at all, you’ve got to go to the “Experimental” section of the menu, then tinker around in there for a while. (Would you guess to change the orientation from portrait to landscape, you should click the font-size button? I wouldn’t.)

Amazon’s packed plenty of smart features into its web browser, but mostly failed to acknowledge them, Basten told Wired.com. “Amazon’s paying for the Kindle’s 3G access,” she says. They “will be conflicted about [heavy internet use], and it shows.”

But once you get the hang of these little tricks — use mobile URLs in portrait, full URLs in landscape, use the built-in article mode (just like Safari’s Reader/Readability/Instapaper) whenever you can, and start building up your own workarounds — the web browsing capability on the Kindle 3 is really tremendous. Newspapers, blogs, Twitter, Google Reader — it does them all well. It’s not just an e-book reader; it’s an honest-to-goodness reading machine.

All images courtesy of Andrys Basten and A Kindle World.

See Also:

• Amazon Strikes Back at the iPad With New, $140 Kindle
• The Best Gadget Is the One That Gets To Your House
• Why Does the New Kindle Have A Microphone?
• Safari 5’s ‘Reader’ Nudges Web Publishers to App Store
• Amazon Kindle 3 May Be On Its Way
• New, Improved Instapaper for Kindle

Just as the e-readers market seemed poised for a shakeout, Sharper Image–a store best known for its R2-D2 droids and ionic air purifier–has decided to jump in with a new e-reader.

Sharper Image has announced ‘Literati,’ a device with a color screen that will retail for $160. The device will be powered by the Kobo e-book store. Literati will have Wi-Fi connectivity, wireless book downloads and free reading apps.

The Literati has been created after an “extensive two-year design and development process,” says Sharper Image, and will ship nationwide in early October.

The Literati comes to market at a time when upstart e-readers are disappearing. Price wars by the big three e-reader makers–Amazon, Sony and Barnes & Noble and competition in the category has taken its toll on companies. Earlier this month, Foxit announced it will stop development on its eSlick e-reader. Plastic Logic canceled its plans to bring its e-reader to market, while Cool-er’s e-readers have been listed out of stock in the U.S. for months.

Meanwhile, bigger e-reader makers are ramping up their marketing efforts. Barnes & Noble has started aggressively selling the Nook reader in its stores. Amazon new, improved Kindle e-reader also seems to have turned into best-seller with Amazon racing to keep up with the demand.

Literati will wade into this fiercely competitive market. The color screen on the device is interesting. Though the company hasn’t offered any details about it, it is likely to be an LCD display. But the device doesn’t have a big price advantage over its rivals. The Literati costs just $20 less than the $190 Kindle.

What it has going for it is an impressive retail distribution network. The Literati will be available in stores such as Bed Bath & Beyond, Best Buy, JC Penney, Kohl’s and Macy’s.

See Also:

• Plastic Logic Que E-Reader Turns Into Vaporware
• Kobo E-Reader First on iPad
• Upstart E-readers Fade to Black as Tablets Gain Momentum
• 5 Things That Will Make E-Readers Better in 2010
• E-Readers Will Survive the Onslaught of Tablets

You might think it was already dead, but sales for the Barnes & Noble Nook (both B&N-branded hardware and multi-platform software apps) are booming.

The company’s web stores are doing great, too: B&N has a bigger share of the market in digital books (an estimated 20 percent) than it has in physical books.

That’s pretty good considering the Nook’s only been available for nine months, and the company still generates more revenue selling hardcovers and paperbacks than anyone, including Amazon.

Surprised? It’s easy to think about e-reading as a two-horse race, with Amazon’s austere text-centric Kindle facing off against Apple’s “magical” iPad, like PCs vs Macs or Protestants vs Catholics. And it’s true, Barnes & Noble lost money this past quarter, partly because it’s still sorting out its messy relations with its investors.

But Barnes & Noble is for real, and isn’t going anywhere. In the religious analogy, the Nook might be, I don’t know, Judaism, trying to adapt to a newer world while holding onto its traditional community.

Barnes & Noble has consistently gone for a hybrid strategy: providing touch and text, tightly integrating e-sales with its existing stores while also selling the Nook at Best Buy, letting its books be read on the Nook as well as other platforms. B&N’s apps for PC and Mac are arguably best-in-class (bonus points, too, for getting its Mac app out way before Amazon’s). The company is doubling down on (and rebranding) its apps for mobile devices. And it’s drawing on a solid base of neighborhood customer/members and university bookstores. Even as Amazon cuts its prices and diversifies its models to match the Nook, it can’t match Barnes & Noble’s deep reach into the real world.

According to B&N, its members with Nooks have increased their spending by 20%. The company’s building and staffing Nook boutiques in its stores. The idea is that you’ll go buy the Nook in the store, learn how to use it in the store, browse through titles (for free) in the store. And by the way, you might also want to buy some coffee, have lunch, pick up a photo album — all goods with better margins than books.

If the Kindle offers the promise of books anywhere at once and nowhere in particular, the Nook keeps alive the idea that books have a place. And the best place, Barnes & Noble thinks, is in one of its stores.

Photo credit: orb9220/Flickr

Related posts:

• 5 Things That Will Make E-Readers Better in 2010
• Nook Software Update Adds Web Browser, Chess
• Wi-Fi Only Nook For $150 in Best Buy
• 5 Things That Make Us Want Barnes & Noble’s Nook E-Reader

Samsung’s BD-C8000 is the world’s first portable 3-D Blu-ray player. It is also a pretty pointless and misleading waste of time. Despite the 3-D part of the same, the player doesn’t show any more than plain ol’ 2D on its own screen. For the extra dimension, you’ll need to hook it up to a 3D television.

If you have a 3-D TV, it’s pretty likely you already have a 3-D Blu-ray player. This leaves the new Samsung player in a rather queer position, especially as it costs $500, or the price of an iPad. (Or 3 Wal-mart fixies and a couple cases of beer. –Ed.)

Now, it’s not all bad. The BD-C8000 has a 10.3-inch screen and Wi-Fi, which combine with the power of widgets — or “Samsung Apps” — to bring you Blockbuster, YouTube and others. You won’t be storing any movies on there, though: The player has just 1GB memory. If you’re really into movies, might we suggest buying an iPad instead, and skipping the battery-sucking spinning disk part altogether (battery life is claimed to be three hours, which really means 1.5-hours).

If you absolutely do need the capability to maybe, someday hook up to a 3-D TV and never stray far from a PowerPoint, the BD-C8000 is available now, through Amazon. Or, you know, you could buy something else. (*cough* iPad *cough*).

Samsung BD-C8000 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player [Amazon via Oh Gizmo!]

See Also:

• Blu-ray Maker Re-Boxes $500 Player, Charges $3500
• Panasonic Announces Sexy, Pointless Portable Blu-ray Player …

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.