Very kewl and worth a post. Visit Flickr for the details.

Ipod Saves Soldier’s Life

Of all the news that was released today… the one that caught my eye was this: Palm founder sells shares. If I was Jeffrey Hawkins I definitely would do the same thing. PALM shares dropped 5.69% today. More than likely because of the news of the all-in-one iPod Nano, iPhone, and internet communicator that is combined in the new Apple iPhone. This thing is just sick!

A ton of pics and almost the whole keynote can be found on Engadget.

Some exerpts that were pretty interesting from the keynote:

“So photos, SMS, and the phone app — that is part of our phone package for iPhone. Really great call management, scroll through contacts with your finger, all the information at your fingertips. Favorites, last century [shows dialer], calendar, SMS texting, incredible photo app, the ability to take any picture and make it your wallpaper. I think you’ll agree… we’ve reinvented the phone.”

Mini Laptop on a phone. Can it get any better than this.

“Now let’s take a look at an internet communications device. We’ve got some real breakthroughs here. We’ve got rich HTML emails on iPhone. It works with any IMAP or POP3 email service. We wanted the best web browser on a phone — so we picked the best one in the world, Safari. We have Safari running on iPhone — it’s the first fully-usable browser on a cellphone. We have Google Maps.”

Apple’s flagship internet browser Safari and Google Maps built in. From the pics the web pages show up as a normal page vice a manipulated mobile version using a browser as Opera Mini. Now that’s freakin’ kewl. With the high screen resolution Google Maps looks spectacular. I would instantaneously pick up the iPhone for directions before running to the nearest computer for directions. I’m currently using Google Maps Mobile but again, the screen res sucks. Normal cell phone processing speed also sucks. So loading Google Maps Mobile takes a bit. The video I linked to below shows it loading in a snap on iPhone.

“I can look at my email in a split view, just like I’m on my computer. I like the fullscreen view — we have the standard inbox, drafts, all the folders, real email just like you’re used to, right here on your phone. Again, free IMAP email from Yahoo. Let me create an email message, let me show you what that’s like… I just type PH and boom, address completion.”

Was actually looking for Gmail vice Yahoo Mail. Oh well, I’m pretty sure Google will have a Gmail Mobile app that can be downloaded and installed by the time the iPhone makes it to consumers.

“Our most popular iPod is $199 — what’s a smartphone cost? Somewhere around $299 with a two year contract.”

“What should we price it at? For a 4GB model we’re pricing it at $499 — no premium whatsoever.

“We’re going to have an 8GB model for just $599.”

And for all the features you’ll receive on this gadget the price seems pretty reasonable. You’ll probably hear many complainers over the price but you’re buying something state-of-the-art that can do more and better than any other smart phone on the market. Seriously, what do you expect?

“When’s it going to be available? We’re shipping them in June — we’re announcing it today because we have to go get FCC approval… we thought it’d be better to introduce this today rather than let the FCC introduce this.
Europe in the 4th quarter of this year, Asia in 2008. “We’ve chosen Cingular.”

“They’re going to be our exclusive partner in the US — it’s a unique partnership though. We’re going to be doing innovation together. We worked on visual voicemail, the first fruit of this collaboration. We’ll be selling iPhone through our own stores and Cingular stores.”

June this year for the U.S. Dammit! And I just re-upped my contract with Sprint for another 2 years recently. I need to find a way out of this within 6 months. Must… have…. iPhone…..

Here’s part of the video of Steve Jobs’ intro to the iPhone keynote on CNET: Video: Jobs launches long-awaited iPhone

There’s also one of him talking about the applications on the iPhone: Video: Jobs demos new iPhone apps

Higher quality images of the iPhone on display from Apple Insider can be found here. These images are effin’ awesome!

All in all, pretty damn impressive. They also launched the iTV… but it doesn’t tickle my fanny as the other.

Update 1: The whole Apple keynote video can now be found on Apple’s site: Macworld San Francisco 2007 keynote address

Leah Culver is an effin’ genius! It’s small, simple ideas as this that drive me up the wall. I’m having one of those, “Why didn’t I think of that?” moments. The last one I was up in rage about was the Million Dollar Page.

Now if I could only figure out how to monetize this blog to get my very own stripper…..

*muhahahahaha*

Not too long ago I blogged about the iPod Updater wiping out some iPod Nanos and nothing that Apple provided could remedy the problem. I’m pretty sure that pissed a lot of folks off because my blog received over a hundred comments of praise for the solution. Thanks for all the kind words everyone…

Recently though Apple released a new version of iTunes dubbed “iTunes 7.” Big upgrade for Apple and has been a major pain in their ass and ours for PC users. I’ve heard all kinds of complaints as in uses too much memory (excess of 100mb), songs skip when played through iTunes, and they hate the new Graphical User Interface (GUI). I’ve even just read about someone hating their shortcut icon shown to your above-right. G-damn…

I just want to report (I know I’m late but I wanted to play with it for a while before commenting) that not everyone sees these same problems or feels the same way. To me the GUI is a big step in the right direction. It could be a little better and a lot of peeps have been saying that it mimicks Windows Media Player 11 in a lot of ways. Personally, I don’t see that but in only a couple of ways. GUI wise it’s just iTunes 6.5 tuned up a bit. Both media players are doing their own thing and with the stiff competition and hate for each others’ brands I doubt there’s “copying” going on behind the scenes.

Looking at the pic below you can tell at first glance the the music library view looks pretty damn slick. Same as before but with newer icons and the addition of the album covers. You can also scroll the album covers using your mouse scroll wheel which makes navigation a little more friendly and quick. There have been compaints of this sucking up system memory but mine stays around 70-90mb at all times. I have a total of 1536mb so I seriously don’t care if it used 200 as does Firefox sometimes. *shrugs*

Another nice addition is the radio library. I started counting but stopped when I got to about 200 radio stations. So far I’ve seen speeds ranging from 24kbps to 160kbps. A lot of the 128kbps stations sound great. I sometimes catch myself listening to the radio stations more often than my own media library.

The other slick menu I found (that was long overdue for a revamp) was the iPod management center which used to be located in iPod preferences under edit. Now it gets its own full screen. iPod udpate is now more user friendly because it merged with iTunes. As soon as you plug your iPod in your USB port with iTunes 7 installed you will be brought to the screen below. There are tabs located across the top for easy submenu navigation and if you have the latest iTunes installed you’ll know when to upgrade your iPod software unlike before with the separate iPod updater. When I updated mine the process was streamlined and it presented no lockups like in the past. The GUI also covered my whole update process. The very bottom is another nice graphics feature showing you an updated view of space free, total space, and space left on your iPod hard drive. It also breaks it down into what type of media is present and how much space each is occupying. Clicking on the graphic changes the numbers to how many songs for each media and clicking again brings up total play time.

Another nice addition are movie downloads in the iTunes store. I’m not sure how this is going for them but paying $9.99 for older titles and $14.99 for new to DVD’s is going to keep me away as long as Netflix is in business. Maybe this is all prep for the upcoming Video iPod with wide screen and touch screen (not to be confused with their current iPod w/ video). You can only speculate with Apple.

One last feature that I absolutely loved was being able to download almost all of my album covers through iTunes from Apple’s servers. Most of mine before were missing and some were wrong. So what I did was select all my music in my music library and discarded all my old album covers. Then I right clicked on all the highlighted songs and clicked “Get Album Artwork.” iTunes then checked all my songs with album names listed and downloaded the covers in pretty decent quality. Great small addition.

There have been a few small bugs here and there with the new update but nothing major. I haven’t heard anything from people installing on Apple’s own hardware though so that’s a good sign.

If you haven’t yet then I suggest you grab the latest addition of iTunes 7 from Apple’s site…. only if you’re running over 256mb of RAM and a 1Ghz processor. Otherwise don’t expect to be doing anything quick in iTunes 7.

A couple of days ago my iPod Nano sh!t the bed after i did the 3-23 update to software version 1.1.1. The symptoms were:

1) Without being connected to my computer seems to work normally.
2) After connecting to computer via supplied USB cable to my bad-a$$ machine using Windows XP Pro funny things happened like:

a) iPod display stuck in “Do Not Disconnect”
b) Trying to bring up iTunes or 3-23 Updater locks up both programs sometimes even locks up certain portions of Windows. *was really scratching my head over this one*
c) Cannot safely disconnect via tray icon

For a couple of days i just threw it aside and told myself I’d just deal with it later. Today the itch started. So I played with it a little more for a couple of hours but didn’t make any head way. I then turned to Apple Support but nothing on their website listed any problems with their updater. Then i went over to the iPod Nano forum on the Apple website. Seems posts were coming in left and right as I read through them. One guy seemed to have a fix but when I tried it, it didn’t work. It involved downloading the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. I had problems downloading it at first because HP no longer hosted it on their website but I found it in another thread in the Apple forums. I played around with the tool somemore but it kept locking up on me. So finally I tried just restarting my computer and disconnecting my iPod Nano before it restarted. Ran the tool without the iPod connected so it would display the format screen and then connected the iPod. It took maybe 30 seconds for the tool to correctly recognize the iPod but when it did I full formatted in FAT32 and everything else went smooth. So I’m just going to share this little knowledge that I’ve attained in case someone else runs into this problem.

Here are the correct steps (must do in this order):

1) Download and install HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool
2) Make sure iPod Nano is disconnected
3) Restart computer
4) After logged back into desktop you’ll need to do one of 2 things

a) If you “do not” have iTunes installed then continue on to step 5
b) If you “do” have iTunes installed then you’ll need to disable a couple of services that will constantly look for your iPod connection. Bring up your task manager by hitting (CTRL+ALT+DLT). Find “iPodService.exe” & “iTunesHelper.exe” and disable them by right clicking on the processes one at a time and clicking “End Process.”

5) Bring up HP Formatter Tool
6) When format window is up plug iPod Nano using supplied USB cable
7) Give both your computer and HP Formatter Tool some time to recognize your iPod Nano
Now select format type of FAT32
9) Click Format (it’s better to not do a quick format so stick with default of full format)
10) After pop-up window appears notifying you that format is complete, close HP Formatter Tool
11) Bring up iPod Updater 3-23 (download and install from Apple site if haven’t yet)
12) Do full restore
13) The restore should have automatically updated your software but if it hasn’t then run update.
14) Everything should be fully operational now. If for some reason your iPod Nano or computer locked up some where in the listed steps then start over with Step 2.

Hope this helps some unfortunate iPod Nano user out there and Apple really needs to post something about this before it becomes a big deal.

Update: Recently Apple pushed out another updater so make sure you have the iPod 6-28 Updater.

Update: Comments are closed because of the release of iTunes 7 and new updater. Thanks.

had myself falling out of my chair laughing after watching the new Mac TV ads. there are 6 of them and everyone should check them out. “Restarting” is my favorite.

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