Tech Digest to live-blog Apple's product announcement tonight, 6PM GMT
As everyone and their dementia-ridden grandmothers can tell you, there’s a super-secret Apple product launch happening tonight, and as ‘super-secret’ implies, no-one really knows what will be announced. Sure, there’s rumours circling thar intarwebs faster than it takes a Microsoft fanboy to say “yeh well the Zune 2.0 will be available in PINK”, but nothing’s been set in concrete as yet. Except it’s 98.931% guaranteed Steve Jobs will be wearing a black-turtleneck-and-jeans combo when he makes the announcement.
Alex from Shiny Shiny, and yours truly from Tech Digest will be heading over to the BBC studios in London tonight to watch a live broadcast via satellite of Steve Jobs’s conference in California and will be merrily live-blogging the night away. So, keep pressing F5 obsessively on our live-blog post here at Tech Digest, as we’ll be updating every few minutes.
Want to hear some of those far-fetched rumours the Apple kids have been spreading in the last few weeks? Read on below the jump for some of the best, so you can have the power to giggle tonight when most of them are proven to be crazy fanboy lies.
1.) iPhone ringtones – if people can spend valuable dosh on the Crazy Frog ringtone, then I’m sure they can spend even more money on ringtones for their lovely sleek iPhones. Expect to be able to download them via iTunes if this is what tonight’s announcement concerns. If tonight is purely about ringtones though, there’s bound to be some angry fanboys out there jonesing for that new touchscreen iPod…
2.) iPod Touch – possibly the most popular (more likely, most-desired) rumour is that the next-gen iPod will be a widescreen, touch-screen ‘Pod. We’ve been hearing these rumours for close to a year now, when the iPhone was first blabbed about, and reports that it will even run on a scaled-down version of OS X have been doing the rumour-circuit.
3.) DAB radio on your iPod – as Susi points out, iPods are all well and good, but they do mean you avoid discovering new music as your ears aren’t tuned to the radio as often as they used to be. If a small aerial was added to the ‘pod, or even built into the headphones, you’ll never have to listen to the same tired old Kasabian tracks again, and you’ll be able to join in on conversations with your hipster friends in American Apparel when they discuss the latest underground indie sensations.
4.) Widescreen iPod Nano – not that anyone particularly uses a Nano these days, when 30GB+ of storage is far too tempting for most, but the added advantage of a widescreen to your Nano means flipping through album artwork would be more entertaining that reading your dog-eared copy of The London Paper or avoiding the gaze of the toaster-toating mumbling hobo across from you on the tube ride home.
5.) Yellow Submarine Beatles iPod – this rumour ran for weeks back in July, and my lame Photoshop mock-up sent people into a spin, either crying in anguish over the urine-yellow shade and association with the musty Beatles, or giving baby boomers a sense of satisfaction that finally, a product was aimed at them. Other than Depends, I mean.
6.) Apple iGamer – a long shot, admittedly, but there’s been plenty of evidence to suggest Apple are beefing up their gaming skillzorz, by secretly hiring teams of game designers, and sources are dropping hints more often than a Big Brother evictee’s trousers. Obviously there’s stiff competition from Nintendo with their DS, and Sony’s PSP, but Apple’s got legions of fans who’d probably buy a plastic film cannister containing a single hair from Jobs’s head, so success would be guaranteed.
7.) iTunes kiosks – we’ve already seen the iPod vending machines, surely the next evolutionary step would be providing iPod users the chance to download tracks in kiosks all across the US? That’s what PDA Live are saying anyway, and they even go as far to suggest they’ll have a touch-screen UI, and you can sample tracks for one minute before buying. That’ll avoid any nasty situations where you accidentally purchase Avril Lavigne’s ‘Falling To Pieces’ instead of Faith No More’s song by the same name.
Related posts
Apple may launch official iPhone ringtones via iTunes on Wednesday
New OS X iPods rumoured… but is Apple planning a handheld games device?
European iPhone deal nearing completion: O2, Orange, T-Mobile sign revenue-sharing deal with Apple, sources claim
