iPod and Music

The Digital Lifestyle today launched a new page featuring quick (one minute or less) independent video reviews of all of the currently available iPod games from the iTunes music store. The reviews mark a branching out into portable gaming for the site. The Digital Lifestyle will also review as many iPhone games and applications as possible.

Exactly 5 years ago today, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, which has revolutionized the way music is sold. In those five years, iTunes has become the largest and most successful online music retailer as their competitors failed.

What Apple did right and where the others failed was having a simple price structure, not requiring a monthly subscription fee, letting you keep the music you buy, letting you play the music you buy on multiple computers or other devices, and letting you burn the music to CDs.

Apple has added a Movies Coming Soon section to the iThe iTunes store, where you can pre-order movies, which will be automatically downloaded as soon as they are available. In addition to the newest releases, classic movies will also be available to pre-order.

Blacksburg, VA - St. Clair Software is excited to announce a contest to solicit application ideas for the iPhone and iPod Touch. A 16 GB iPod Touch will be awarded to the person who submits the best suggestion for a new iPhone application.

With the much-anticipated release of the developer SDK for the iPhone, a whole new class of iPhone and iPod Touch applications become possible. In its long history in the Macintosh community, St. Clair Software has seen some of the best ideas for software features come directly from users. We want to give the iPhone community a chance to be heard too.

Caldwell, New Jersey - HungryFlix, the Internet's first distributor of premium, independent video content specifically formatted for portable devices, is continuing to drive innovation in the movie download space by announcing that content providers can now upload movies of up to 1GB in size. This increased storage capacity will allow for high quality movies to be delivered to Macs, PCs and especially, Apple TV.

Santa Clara, California - MacService today announced customers purchasing a 320GB hard drive upgrade will receive a free 1GB iPod shuffle (PRODUCT) RED. 320GB hard drive upgrades are available for $345 for both Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. This price includes free ground roundtrip shipping, installation and a laptop shipping container. Overnight roundtrip service is available for $79.

Apple on Thursday released a minor update to iTunes and also vowed to offer Apple TV and iTunes users the treat of a low-cost movie rental each week.

Available only through Apple's automatic update feature as of press time, iTunes 7.6.1 addresses several unnamed bugs with the music software.

The fix also improves compatibility between iTunes and a networked Apple TV running the version 2.0 upgrade, Apple says.

Separately, Apple has also begun informing subscribers to its e-mail newsletters that it will offer a selected movie title each week at a 99-cent price, or a third of the price of a back catalog, standard-definition title. The first title is The Hours.

CUPERTINO, California—February 19, 2008—Apple® today announced that its iPod® shuffle, the world’s most wearable music player, is now even more affordably priced at $49 and that it is introducing a new 2GB model of the iPod shuffle for $69. The popular iPod shuffle is just half a cubic inch in volume, weighs just half an ounce, features an aluminum design with a built-in clip and comes in five colors—silver, blue, green, purple and a (PRODUCT) RED special edition.

Customers who’d like to carry more music, photos, and videos with them now have new models of iPhone and iPod touch with double the memory from which to choose. The iPhone is now available with 16GB for $499. It joins the 8GB model for $399, while the iPod touch now comes in a new 32GB model for $499. It joins the 16GB and 8GB models for $399 and $299, respectively.

Several friends have told me that they like the song in Apple's new MacBook Air commercial, "New Soul" by Yael Naïm, which I bought today. This isn't the first time a song used in an Apple commercial has made a big splash.