Macworld’s opening day answered all our anticipations, with 5 major announcements from El Stivo. The keynote introduced us as follows:
- iTunes Movie Rentals Service.
- iPhone & iPod Touch Firmware Updates.
- Time Capsule.
- Apple TV Take Two.
- MacBook Air.
It’s not that we were strangers to most of the new announcements, on the contrary, most of them already leaked weeks before, and you could read about it in this blog. Lets view some of them in a nutshell:
iTunes Movie Rentals Service
As we already posted, a week ago, Apple teamed up with all major film studios, such as Paramount, Lions Gate Entertainment, Walt Disney, Miramax, Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox and more, to bring the top movie titles into iTunes, and to enable users renting a film directly from their iPhones or their iPod touch devices, for 3.99$ per 24h.
iPhone & iPod Touch Firmware Updates.
iPhone – As we reported several weeks ago, Apple officially announced on Firmware update 1.1.3 which includes:
- GoogleMaps application is able to pinpoint your location.
- SMS can be send to multiple people, at once.
- Bookmark add-on for web sites.
- Re-arrangement of home screen icons.
- Video chaptering.
- Music lyrics display.
iPod Touch - This one wasn’t known to us up till yesterday. Apple released some new add-ons to the Touch players. The new update features Mail program, Maps, web clips, stocks, weather and notes. BUT, this is not a free update, this one will cost you 20$.
Time Capsule
To make it simple, this is a wireless backup server. To make it complicated, it is a full Airport Extreme base station with 802.11n wireless and a server grade hard drives that enables to backup all Leopard OS Macs in your network. The Time Capsule comes in 2 configurations:
- 500GB for $300.
- 1TB for $500.
Apple TV Take Two
The major improvements in Take Two TV is that it requires no computer, renting movies is much easier and you can have them in HD Dolby 5.1 format. The Take Two edition supports audio, video and photo browsing via Flickr. To upgrade your Apple TV to a Take Two version, you will have to update the software. It is free of charge and will be available in 2 weeks.
MacBook Air
This is the big one, that everyone was expecting to hear about. MackBook Air goes live with the title of the thinnest notebook on earth, just 4mm (!). It features:
- 13.3″ screen display with ambient light sensor.
- A black keyboard with a LED backlit.
- A multi-touch pad (like the iPhone).
Further details will be available in the next posts.
Good news from Cupertino, as apple announces that EMI Music’s digital catalog (and some other major labels like Virgin, Sony BMG, American Recording) will be available for purchase DRM-free from the iTunes Store in May. The tracks will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for just $1.29 per song with an option for second tier songs for only $0.69. The meaning is that you will be able to transfer your non-protected songs to other computers freely, as we are talking about 8 million DRM-Free songs to be available for a purchase from now on. Additionaly, iTunes users, will be able to upgrade their entire previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents ($0.30) a song. The rest of the songs will be offered in the same versions as today, 128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM at the same price of 99 cents ($0.99) per song. If that’s not enough, Apple has also announced that music store downloads are available over 3G connectivity (without the need for a WiFi around)with the same price and sound quality, which means your new iPhone is capable of downloading iTunes tracks directly – Kudos !
