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Hands-On With New Apple iPods

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Apple on Wednesday refreshed its family of iPod products. The iPod Nano, iPod Touch and iPod Shuffle all received some compelling makeovers that should help Apple stay in the lead in the portable media player market.

The iPod Nano was the most interesting upgrade. It does away with the click wheel seen in previous model and is now more like a belt buckle with a multi touchscreen displaying four mini icons on the main screen — basically, a quarter of the size of an iPhone or iPod Touch.

The Nano is now 1.6 inches wide, 1.4 inches tall and just 0.3 inches thick including the belt clip.

One screen on the Nano shows ‘Artists’, ‘Playlists’, ‘Genius Mixes’ and ‘Now playing.’ Swipe your finger and you get a few more apps: radio, photo, podcasts and settings. There’s no home button, so you have to hold your finger down on the screen to exit an app, which is simple enough. You can also rearrange the icons by holding your finger on an app until it jiggles, then move it to wherever you’d like–just like on the iPhone.

The question remains as to whether or not the iPod Nano is running iOS and if we’ll be able to jailbreak it to run different apps. Apple hasn’t disclosed whether the operating system was iOS but it sure looks like it.

Also noteworthy is that the Nano does not include a camera, even though last year’s model just introduced one. I guess nobody cared about shooting video with the tiny device, which isn’t surprising.

What’s nifty on the Nano is the small integrated clip to snap the device on to your pocket or belt buckle. The entire body including the clip is made of aluminum so it feels nice and sturdy.

Moving on to the iPod Touch, this was a predictable but monster update. It’s about a millimeter thinner than the iPhone 4, even though it’s got most of the same guts. There are the front and rear cameras–the rear for shooting high-definition videos and photos, the front for ‘FaceTime’ video conferencing.

The Nano now has an Apple A4 processor and the high-resolution “retina display.” Grip it in your hand and it feels really smooth and light.

I had a chance to test FaceTime and it felt even faster than FaceTime on the iPhone 4, though this time around Apple might have just had a better Wi-Fi connection.

Overall, the new iPod Touch is the same as the iPhone 4 but now we can’t really say “It’s an iPhone without a phone,” because the Touch includes a videoconferencing webphone! That’s a major difference and should have an impact on videoconferencing in general.

Last, and least important, was an upgrade for the iPod Shuffle. To put it simply, it’s another belt-clip iPod similar to the Nano, only with the traditional click wheel. On the top is an integrated button for ‘VoiceOver,’ which enables you to dictate the playlist or artist you want to listen to. Example, if you say “Play songs by The Shins,” the Shuffle will obey your commands.

The Shuffle is puny– 1.2 inches wide, 1.1 inches tall and 0.3 inches thick. And it is so lightweight I could barely even feel it in my pocket, which should be ideal for athletes.

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Update: Corrected an error where I said the previous iPod Nano snapped photos, when actually it only shot video.

See Also:

• Hands-on With the New $100 Apple TV
• Apple Takes Aim at Cable With Tiny New Apple TV
• Live Blog: Apple’s iPod, Music Event
• Apple to Live Stream Press Conference — to Apple Customers Only

Hands-On With New Apple iPods | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet

 

 

Sources: Cisco estimates based on CAIDA publications, Andrew Odlyzko

The Web Is Dead? A Debate

How the Web Wins

How Do Native Apps and Web Apps Compare?

Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures.

Who’s to Blame:
Us
As much as we love the open, unfettered Web, we’re abandoning it for simpler, sleeker services that just work.
by Chris Anderson

You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service.

You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.

This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen). The fact that it’s easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution.

A decade ago, the ascent of the Web browser as the center of the computing world appeared inevitable. It seemed just a matter of time before the Web replaced PC application software and reduced operating systems to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers,” as Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen famously said. First Java, then Flash, then Ajax, then HTML5 — increasingly interactive online code — promised to put all apps in the cloud and replace the desktop with the webtop. Open, free, and out of control.

But there has always been an alternative path, one that saw the Web as a worthy tool but not the whole toolkit. In 1997, Wired published a now-infamous “Push!” cover story, which suggested that it was time to “kiss your browser goodbye.” The argument then was that “push” technologies such as PointCast and Microsoft’s Active Desktop would create a “radical future of media beyond the Web.”

“Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don’t we? But the center of interactive media — increasingly, the center of gravity of all media — is moving to a post-HTML environment,” we promised nearly a decade and half ago. The examples of the time were a bit silly — a “3-D furry-muckers VR space” and “headlines sent to a pager” — but the point was altogether prescient: a glimpse of the machine-to-machine future that would be less about browsing and more about getting.

Who’s to Blame:
Them
Chaos isn’t a business model. A new breed of media moguls is bringing order — and profits — to the digital world.
by Michael Wolff

An amusing development in the past year or so — if you regard post-Soviet finance as amusing — is that Russian investor Yuri Milner has, bit by bit, amassed one of the most valuable stakes on the Internet: He’s got 10 percent of Facebook. He’s done this by undercutting traditional American VCs — the Kleiners and the Sequoias who would, in days past, insist on a special status in return for their early investment. Milner not only offers better terms than VC firms, he sees the world differently. The traditional VC has a portfolio of Web sites, expecting a few of them to be successes — a good metaphor for the Web itself, broad not deep, dependent on the connections between sites rather than any one, autonomous property. In an entirely different strategic model, the Russian is concentrating his bet on a unique power bloc. Not only is Facebook more than just another Web site, Milner says, but with 500 million users it’s “the largest Web site there has ever been, so large that it is not a Web site at all.”

According to Compete, a Web analytics company, the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010. “Big sucks the traffic out of small,” Milner says. “In theory you can have a few very successful individuals controlling hundreds of millions of people. You can become big fast, and that favors the domination of strong people.”

Milner sounds more like a traditional media mogul than a Web entrepreneur. But that’s exactly the point. If we’re moving away from the open Web, it’s at least in part because of the rising dominance of businesspeople more inclined to think in the all-or-nothing terms of traditional media than in the come-one-come-all collectivist utopianism of the Web. This is not just natural maturation but in many ways the result of a competing idea — one that rejects the Web’s ethic, technology, and business models. The control the Web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back.

This development — a familiar historical march, both feudal and corporate, in which the less powerful are sapped of their reason for being by the better resourced, organized, and efficient — is perhaps the rudest shock possible to the leveled, porous, low-barrier-to-entry ethos of the Internet Age. After all, this is a battle that seemed fought and won — not just toppling newspapers and music labels but also AOL and Prodigy and anyone who built a business on the idea that a curated experience would beat out the flexibility and freedom of the Web.

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine