Joy of Gadgets

This picture from CrunchGear says it all:

Effective immediately. Looks like Apple got some serious money from the early adopters. For the same price, you can also get a 16gb iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone sans phone functionality. The iPod touch isn’t available just yet, though.

A lot more was announced by Apple today as well, including the ability to purchase songs from your iPod Touch over WiFi. Wonder if you will be able to do that from your iPhone as well. And when you’re at Starbucks, you will be able to buy whatever music they’re playing too!

The wireless music store? Available globally. Considering my employer announced intentions to do a wireless music store, I wonder if Apple’s announcement will affect their plans any. One can hope, anyway, as Apple is proving it can be gone globally.

The Symbian Guru reviewed nuTsie earlier today. I have to agree, it’s a pretty cool idea for an app. The idea of streaming music to my mobile phone is something I’ve wanted since I purchased a locker on MP3Tunes. However, I have some serious issues with it–serious enough that I would much rather sync my Nokia N95 with Nokia Media Transfer.

1. The app requires that I enable Warning sounds in my profile on my Nokia N95. I turn these off for a reason.
2. Can’t control the volume with my usual volume control. Lame!
3. The tracks are encoded in a lower quality bitrate. Now that’s useful for streaming over EDGE, but I’d appreciate the option of choosing a higher bitrate when I’m using WiFi.
4. Some of the tracks are flat out wrong or are missing large chunks of data.”Us and Them” on Dark Side of the Moon is only 3:29? Try 7:40 (at least on my copy). Oh wait, it is playing the whole song. Obviously displaying the wrong information in the client.
5. I can hear “blips” and such. Not sure if it’s due to streaming, bad encoding, or what. But it detracts from the experience.

I will be watching this app develop. I’d love to see a native Symbian version of this app. The fact this is a Java app is supposed to explain why #1 and #2 are issues.

I got word yesterday I had won an iPod Shuffle. Given that I carry a number of Nokia phones that can effectively serve as music and video players, I wasn’t in any hurry to actually buy an iPod. However, I certainly can’t turn down a free one. Not sure when it will show, but I’m looking forward to trying the whole iTunes experience from soup to nuts.

One of my neighbors at the bus stop this morning was sporting an iPod, which was entirely new. He told me he had bought the Nano for his wife–the fact it was pink suggests that’s probably true–but after playing with it a little bit, he wants to get one for himself. He started asking me about the whole iTunes experience, how purchased music could be moved around and so forth. I had to explain what DRM was and why it makes things painful. Apple’s DRM is better than much of the other DRM, but still.

I know how the stuff works in theory, but because I’ve never had an iPod, I’ve never had to deal with these issues first-hand, making my experience more theoretical than practical. I’m looking forward to gaining some practical experience not only for my own use but to help out my friends and neighbors who are also just starting down this iPod road.

I was wondering when Golden Boy Michael Robertson was going to weigh in on the Steve Jobs “Drop DRM” article. And weigh in he did. Here are the key points he makes:

• The 30% of the iTunes catalog that doesn’t come from the big-4 music companies? Sell them without DRM. Yeah, that’s a good idea. Do it with the video too. A while ago, I had picked up a free Battlestar Galactica thing on iTunes. Why does something you are giving away NEED DRM on it?
• Microsoft licenses PlaysForSure. Why can’t Apple? Apple and Microsoft have taken completely different approaches here. PlaysForSure is fairly ornerous, Apple’s DRM a bit less so. My guess is that the terms that Apple had to agree to in order to get their less onerous DRM are very different than what Microsoft had to agree to. At least that’s what Steve is suggesting. We’ll never know for sure, of course…
• Mix and Match computer software, retail options, media players, etc. This is going one step beyond removing the DRM, let’s make it possible for any computer, any media player, any music store, and any media manager software to interoperate. While I agree that would be nice for the consumer, it’s probably not going to happen. Apple’s entire value proposition is that they provide an entire soup-to-nuts environment for purchasing and consuming audio and video content. Nothing is stopping anyone else from doing the exact same thing Apple did.
• Make iTunes for Linux. While there is no version that actually runs natively on Linux, the folks at Codeweavers have supported a version of iTunes in their Crossover Linux product for about two years now. Granted, it would do much better with a native Linux port. Of course, once they go DRM-free, they could easily do away with requiring that iTunes be used to purchase content from the iTunes Store. That way, anything could purchase content from iTunes and play it in whatever media player their computer has.

What do you think about all this? Leave your feedback in the comments below.