Today, the little company from Cupertino that could held an intimate press event, in part to let their new CEO Tim Cook get his feet wet with a home field advantage, and in part to silence many, many rumors floating around about one of the company's flagship products, the industry-beating iPhone.
So what did Cook have to tell the Apple faithful and the hordes of digiterati hanging on the edge of their seats, waiting for speed, power and glory? Something like this …
- The iPod Nano has been refreshed from its weird little square shaped one-off gadgetry to become a product that runs the company's popular iOS, starting with the newest version five due out October 12th. This includes a cool watch band for you to wear (mirroring the efforts of many third party developers). Does that mean it'll run Bluetooth, as many other devices do? We believe yes (since running a headphone cable down your arm to your watch is super clumsy). $129 for 8GB, $149 for 16GB
- The iPod Touch got an update for the new iOS 5, and as of October 12
- The iPod Classic, which had been rumored as "doomed," got a stay of execution, allowing fans to keep up to 160 GB of music on one device.
- iOS 5 is a free update available October 12th for all current products (iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, iPod Touch, iPad, iPad 2) that adds new Cards application, a newly improved Notifications system (some say similar to Android), iMessage (unlimited messaging between iOS users), location-enabled Reminders, OS-level integration of Twitter, Newsstand (for magazines), improvements to the Camera and the Game Center, adding Reader and tabbed browsing to Safari (like the Mac OS version), rich text formatting and drag-able addresses in Mail and "PC Free," meaning the machine is ready to go out of the box without hooking it up to a computer.
Blah blah blah — people played along with this nonsense, because it was cute, but everybody really wanted to know about the iPhone. Cook announced the iPhone 4S, a newer iteration of their already successful iPhone. What will that be like?
- features iPad 2's dual-core A5 CPU with dual-core graphics card, allegedly 7x faster than iPhone 4 on games, 2x on actual worky stuff
- runs on HSPA+ networks, allowing download ups to 14.4Mbp/s versus old 7.2Mbp/s
- 8-megapixel camera versus 5mp on the iPhone 4, can acccumulate 73% more light for candid shots
- shoots 1080p video
- Features Airplay mirroring, which is cool with Apple TV units
- 8-hours battery life talk time on 3G, 10 on 2G, 14-hours on video playback. 6-hours 3G web surfing, 10 Wi-Fi
- New trouble-free antennae
- "Siri the Secretary" feature allows voice commands like "set an alarm tomorrow for 11AM", "what's the weather?" as well as reading text messages, play music, etc. etc.
- 16, 32 and 64GB models $199, $299 and $399 (with contract)
- Available on AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, October 14th
We'll have more in-depth analysis on all of this technology Sunday Night on the It's Komplicated webcast (9PM PST on the Geekweek Network) when our special guest Craig Sherman of At Home With Technology will be in-studio with expert analyses and opinions.
[Source: Geekologie, CNET, TUAW, Engadget, Wired]