It was, of course, inevitable. For it is written, in unibody iTablets carved from single blocks of aluminum and carried down from Mount Jobs, that Every iPod Shalt Have a Case.
And so mote it be, this time for the new button-free Shuffle. Oddly enough, we often use the term “condom" to describe these prophylactic, slip-on rubber protectors, but this time it’s pretty close to the truth. Accessory maker iLove is selling these rubbers in four-packs (presumably even an iPod add-on maker balks at selling one such tiny sheath for $13). The pack contains four delicious colors, with “easy access for your port and switches" for her pleasure.
There is also a twin-pack for those of us who feel less lucky, although these are in hard plastic, giving the shuffle the aspect of a disposable Bic lighter. These packs will also be $13. Both available from April.
Apple already offers movies and TV shows in high definition and it should be no surprise that its rival Amazon is prepping to do the same.
A few screen shots unearthed from the Amazon.com website suggest the company is planning to offer HD TV shows for $3 an episode–the same price as it costs on Apple’s iTunes.
The move increases the competition for Apple’s iTunes as Amazon’s online video on demand service ramps up. Amazon might even offer a season’s pass to HD TV shows that could cost about $53, a move that might bring more House and Law & Order junkies to its service.
Amazon has been testing its HD video on demand service for TiVo users for the last few weeks, says Dave Zatz. And so far reports suggest the video quality is "outstanding" with surround sound ability. Amazon could also offer the HD shows through Roku’s streaming media box.
Meanwhile, Apple has been fighting back. Last week the company started distributing HD movies through iTunes for rent at $5 a movie and for purchase at $20 a film.
There’s no official word yet on when Amazon’s latest HD service will go live but it won’t be long before Amazon unveils its latest threat to iTunes.
The new iPod Shuffle is so tiny that we knew there couldn’t be much inside. What is a surprise is that there is just one screw holding the whole thing together — clear evidence that Steve Jobs is still influencing design despite being on leave, doing yoga and drinking mango smoothies.
The folks at iFixit (who else?) have opened up the new model and splayed its tiny guts like a quail on a butterfly board. Other interesting points are that the shiny, mirror-finish clip weighs as much as the rest of the iPod put together and that the battery is tiny. Really tiny, giving less than half the juice of the battery in the older shuffle (now just 73 mAh). That Apple managed to only drop 17% of battery life (12 hours down to 10 hours) shows that this new shuffle has some serious power management going on.
The final surprise is the weight, proving that simile is indeed a great way to make us understand things. With case removed, the battery and electronics inside weigh only 4 grams, or less than a sheet of paper. Even more fascinating — the headphone cord is the exact same length as a piece of string.
Apple has quietly introduced a new 4GB iPod shuffle. Not only is it bigger on the inside — it’s smaller on the outside. So small, in fact, that it has no buttons other than the shuffle mode switch. All the controls are now on the earbud cord, which means that you’ll be stuck using Apple’s own earbuds until third party versions make it to stores.
The new Shuffle also talks to you. Press the center button on the remote (a long press) and the "VoiceOver" function will tell you the name of the song and artist you are listening to, and it will also read your playlists. This is a rather helpful new feature, especially since, at 4GB, the Shuffle is approaching the capacity of the original full-sized white iPod.
VoiceOver speaks 14 languages, from Spanish to Mandarin. The actual speech is generated by iTunes and then schlepped across to the Shuffle when you sync. This means that if you are syncing with a Mac running OS X Leopard (the latest version) you get to hear the rather good robotic voice of Alex. If you are running an older version of the OS, or using a PC you get a rather crappy voice. You can check them out here at the Apple site.
And because the Shuffle now reads out your playlists, you can skip through them until you find the right one. Suggestion: Keep the names short and distinctive to avoid frustration.
The new iPod also loses a couple of hours in battery life — 10 instead of 12, and costs a little more at $80. The old Shuffle is still available in 1GB form for $50.
Over the last four years, TVBLOB, an Italian-based company with a funny name, has sought to bring about the most comprehensive software of web-based features on a TV set.
At this week’s CeBit conference in Germany, TVBLOB finally unveiled the first IPTV media box packing that software, the BLOBBox. Judging by the initial specs, it might be too ambitious for its own good and might end up swallowing some engineers by the whole.
The BLOBBox is like an Apple TV on steroids. It’s a media player/video recorder that connects to TVs and has a 160 GB hard drive, a DTT receiver, is optimized for web connectivity and Bit Torrent downloading (through HTTP/FTP), and also has its own custom Linux OS and browser. Streaming from a PC or network is supposed to be simple (hello Wired colleagues’ MP3 collections!), and comes with several sleek on-screen web apps for browsing Google properties like YouTube and Picasa. And with all of that Torrenting going on, it also plays MP4, DivX and XviD files.
Most importantly, TVBLOB claims that its kit transfers web content to TV seamlessly (with HTML and Ajax), almost mirroring the same type of service as the net-based widget TVs we heard about during CES. The only difference is these web widgets are more likely to be used as conduits for the main content, as opposed to separate bite-sized snack apps.
TVBLOB thinks opening up its SDK (called BLOBKit) will easily encourage developers to come out with widget-style applications for their favorite custom channels.
At almost $500 a box and first available only through an Italian reseller, we think it’s going to take a lot more distribution to force people to want to build apps for this. But as a project with a lot of possibilities, I can see a few developers going deep and trying to set up as many ‘web-widgets’ as they can, with some even losing themselves to the tempting power of the Blob’s openness.
According to TVBLOB, the company is looking to license its software to other OEMs, so we might see actually see a BLOB come to the U.S. sometimes soon.
DoubleTwist is a new, open-source, universal media manager in beta for the Mac. It gathers music, videos and photos, supports tons of devices and has a P2P/social networking component. Will it be great?
DoubleTwist was created by the famous DVD copy-protection reverse-engineer who calls himself DVD Jon, so you know it’s friendly to the budget-minded poweruser. So far, it’s been a joy to use, but it’s still in beta and has some flaws. Here’s what it does now, and what it should do:
WHAT DOUBLETWIST DOES Manages Photos, Music and Video on Your Computer It watches your Music, Photos and Movies folders, and lets you drag and drop any other folders into its media browser. There’s also a Spotlight-esque search function to check your folders. Music is organized in sortable list form, while photos and videos are displayed as tiles.
Lets You Maintain an Online “Feed” and Send/Receive Media To/From Other doubleTwist Users DoubleTwist has a built in social-networking aspect that lets you create an account, add friends and shoot files back and forth. You can post video, photos and music to a “feed,” which is basically a media-rich version of the Facebook wall, and it gets syndicated to all your friends.
They say you can send any type of file back and forth on doubleTwist, which seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. We haven’t yet had the chance to fully test this feature, but they remain pretty vague on its limits . And for those who aren’t signed up, you can send them an email link to the doubleTwist servers, where they can view/watch/hear the content you want them to receive.
To add friends on doubleTwist, you basically send any file as a message to the email address your friend used for their doubleTwist account. Once your friend reads/accepts the message inside the doubleTwist app, you’re officially “friends” and any non-drm song/video/photo you send back and forth can be dragged from the message thread to your media library.
Connects to a Variety of Phones and Devices DoubleTwist is really touting its ability to connect with devices here, especially BlackBerry and Android phones. (Not surprisingly, you can’t yet sync with Apple products.) When you plug in your device, it shows up under its model name, and doubleTwist organizes media files in the same way it does for your computer. You can drag and drop freely between the two devices. (see top photo)
Auto-Converts Files to Provide Compatibility With Your Device Because it only works with devices it knows, doubleTwist autoconverts media files as necessary. So if you have a .mp4 video file that your phone doesn’t support, doubleTwist will detect this before uploading and convert appropriately. (We’ll be testing this to see how long a movie in the wrong format might take.)
Connects to Your iTunes Library for Access to Playlists and Other Stuff Like other media devices and apps, doubleTwist can read your iTunes Library XML file, which provides access to playlists and podcasts, in addition to the the rest of your library. Most of the crap that pops up in the left column of iTunes will show up here.
Uploads Photos and Videos to Online Services With Flickr and Facebook integration, you can drag, drop and tag your photos, then upload them with a click, and without exiting doubleTwist. The same thing goes for sending videos to YouTube.
WHAT DOUBLETWIST SHOULD DO iPhone and iPod Support As we mentioned, there’s not a lot of love for iPhone and iPod yet, but the doubleTwist team says this functionality will actually appear in future versions.
AirTunes Support One of my favorite features of using iTunes with an Airport Express is the AirTunes streaming feature. There are 3rd-party apps, such as AirFoil, that take advantage of this feature, so it shouldn’t be too hard to work this into future versions.
Native Playlist Support and Streaming Libraries For now, there is no way to import or create music playlists, aside from what’s already in iTunes. You also can’t connect to other people’s libraries or an iTunes Music Server on your network. This means you’ll still be using iTunes for some stuff.
Advanced File Categorization/Organization Right now, the categorization and organization of media files are a bit rudimentary. Music shows up in a list view, but the only sortable categories are Title, Artist, and Time. Photos and Videos only show up as tiles, with no other view or sort options, except adjusting thumbnail size.
For people with tons of files, this doesn’t quite cut it.
I also don’t really like that when you play a song, it launches a second window which compiles the list of songs played while the app has been open. But there’s no way to remove songs from the list aside from closing the app, nor can you keep playback all in one window. It’s not major, but kinda bleh.
BOTTOM LINE DoubleTwist is an extremely promising app that really could become the de facto standard for media players if they continue to develop and improve on this beta. The idea of not having to use iPhoto ever again (I hate it), or getting more functionality than what VLC offers for videos is pretty exciting. [doubleTwist via MacRumors]
Microsoft has restructured its Zune digital music player business which has struggled to find its groove since the device debuted nearly three year ago.
The company has split the hardware and the software teams behind the Zune and says it will work to extend some features of the Zune player to other hardware devices such as PCs, TVs and mobile phones.
Microsoft’s move with Zune is reminiscent of how Nokia transitioned its N-Gage brand from a specific phone to a software service. N-Gage was first launched as a device that would combine phone and gaming. But after tepid user feedback, Nokia reinvented it as a gaming platform. As a software distribution platform N-Gage would allow any user to download games to their Nokia phones and become the go-to place for cellphone games, hoped Nokia.
With Zune, Microsoft could be headed that way. The Zune software team will be combined with Microsoft’s Windows Media Center and Mediaroom units. The hardware team will join the Microsoft’s mobile communications business group.
"This is an extension of the way we’ve been taking the business for some time," said Microsoft in an update. "We’ve said before the strategy for Zune is to provide a great entertainment experience across multiple screens and devices and this move will help us deliver that."
For some time though, Microsoft will continue to churn out more Zune hardware. "We can confirm that Zune is committed to delivering new software, services and devices to consumer later this year," a Microsoft spokesperson told Wired.com
With the iPod Classic now offering a "mere" 120GB of storage, media junkies have little choice but to take just a subset of their collections with them, or buy two iPod. Or, of course, get a life and forget about having all their music, all the time.
But those sad-sacks can now load up on a ridiculous 240GB of music and movies – that’s enough music to last them until they next get laid – on Rapid Repair’s modded iPod 5G. The repair company is retrofitting the 5G model with the MK2431GAH 240GB drive from Toshiba, currently the largest 1.8" single platter drive available. The price is $300, plus the iPod, and you can either pop the thing in yourself (easy) or send it in for the upgrade.
Rapid Repair wants to add this to the iPod Classic and the Zune, too. What a thought. A serious music nerd with a Zune. If this is you, we have a tip: Get out of the house. Talk to people. Hell, even talk to a girl. You’ll thank us for it.
Excitement turned quickly to disappointment when I read about this concept MP3 player by Rhea Jeong. The Colorsonic is a bright, glowing donut of color, and I imagined that it would pulse in time to the music, every chromatic heartbeat would pump the spectrum across its smooth suface, like a 3D iTunes visualizer.
But no, it goes more in the direction of Tokyo Flash watches by introducing a hard-to-understand interface. Music is organized by mood, and the colors represent these moods. Finger the ring in the right spot and the playlist will begin. Multiple colors can be selected to mix genres.
One truly neat part is the headphone storage system. Throw the Bluetooth ‘buds inside the donut’s hole and they will stick there, held fast by magnets.
As SanDisk tries to find more ways to be profitable, the company could kill its older flash-memory based Sansa line of music players and instead focus on promoting its storage cards that come pre-loaded with music.
Instead of the iPod competitors that it has built, SanDisk will be pushing its slotMusic cards business. SlotMusic Cards are microSD memory cards that come pre-loaded with music albums. SanDisk’s recent music players have been designed to promote the storage cards and those players will continue to be available.
A company spokeswoman confirmed the change. "Sandisk is committed to its digital music players and we have the Sansa Fuze and Clip on retail shelves," she says. "We are just looking at a shift in strategy that goes to the core of the company’s focus on flash memory."
SanDisk entered the digital music player in 2005 with the Sansa music player. The inexpensive flash-based players became an iPod alternative for extremely budget conscious buyers.
Yet SanDisk has barely managed to make a dent in iPod’s hegemony. Earlier this month, Apple said it sold 22.7 million iPods worldwide in the previous quarter, a three percent growth from the year before.
Recently, SanDisk started promoting its slotMusic cards product extensively. At the Consumer Electronics Show this year, the company introduced a new player called slotRadio and a line of companion music cards.
It’s a significant evolution for the Sansa players that was first introduced in 2005 with the e100 series. The devices were initially available in the 512 MB and 1 GB versions and featured an SD card slot to add more storage. The flash-based players supported formats such as MP3 and Windows Media Audio (WMA) and storage was expandable using microSD cards.
Now SanDisk wants to make the microSD cards the centerpiece of its digital music business. In October 2008 the company launched the Sansa slotMusic player. The $20 slotMusic players were created to play slotMusic cards or user-loaded microSD cards.
The idea hasn’t been met with great enthusiasm from bloggers. So is SanDisk making the right bet or should it be concede the ring to the iPod and get out of the music player business entirely?
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Manages Photos, Music and Video on Your Computer
Like other media devices and apps, doubleTwist can read your iTunes Library XML file, which provides access to playlists and podcasts, in addition to the the rest of your library. Most of the crap that pops up in the left column of iTunes will show up here.
With Flickr and Facebook integration, you can drag, drop and tag your photos, then upload them with a click, and without exiting doubleTwist. The same thing goes for sending videos to YouTube.
I also don’t really like that when you play a song, it launches a second window which compiles the list of songs played while the app has been open. But there’s no way to remove songs from the list aside from closing the app, nor can you keep playback all in one window. It’s not major, but kinda bleh.
