Apple’s new iThings for 2010 are all pretty cool!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 03 September 2010 00:26

Your IT - Entertainment

Yep, as expected, there’s an iPhone 4-esque new iPod Touch with Facetime and Retina Display, there’s a snazzy new iPod Nano with a multi-touch screen (leading me to wonder when new Nano apps might come), a less exciting new iPod Shuffle and a new version of iTunes that refuses to introduce tabbed browsing.

Apple’s reality distorting September launch event has come and gone, with an Apple TV that I wrote about earlier, an update on when the iPad will finally see iOS 4.2 (it’s in November), when iOS 4.1 is due and new iPods.

While iOS 4.2 for the iPad is exciting, it’s much less exciting to see that iPad owners still have to wait until November to get it, although given the still relatively hopeless tablet competition (despite a swathe of Android 2.2 tablets being launched at IFA in Berlin as we speak), Apple can take its time here to make sure everything is right, and clearly it is doing so.

Of more interest to more people is iOS 4.1, and Steve Jobs promises that not only will this come out next week as a free upgrade for iPhones and iPod Touches that qualify (i.e. effectively no first gen devices), it will fix the Bluetooth bug, the proximity sensor on the iPhone 4 and the currently woeful iPhone 3G hardware performance.

Personally I hope it also fixes the SMS bug I remember from iPhone OS 1.x (or was it 2.x?), where one of the updates saw SMS typing become quite slow. A similar bug is in iOS 4.0.x, whereby starting to type SMS messages is fast, but once you go beyond say the first message length, message typing slows to a crawl.

This was, however, fixed before in earlier iOS versions, so hopefully it will be fixed this time with iOS 4.1, too – along with definite fixes for the very annoying Bluetooth bug that doesn’t always output audio to a paired, connected Bluetooth device, alongside the infuriating proximity sensor bug on the iPhone 4 which sees the screen come back to life so your ear can then touch buttons.

This proximity thing was one of the revolutions Apple introduced – it’s a shame they had to make users wait for an entire ".1" OS update to get such a fundamental thing fixed – but that’s Apple – sometimes they work real fast, other times, real slow.

The same goes for iPhone 3G owners who are prayin’ and a hopin’ Steve was absolutely correct in promising iOS 4.1 will return speedy performance to the iPhone 3G. I guess we’ll all know next week whether the clamour for iOS 4.1.1 grows louder – or softer.

The other big thing in the keynote, for me at least, is the new iPod Nano. Man, is this little gizmo cool or what! Jobs read my mind when he said one of his board of directors wanted to attached it to an wrist band to wear as a watch.

Far out – I do too. Or, at least, I wanna see what it looks like as a watch. Maybe it’ll be too big, but chances are it will be very cool and a swag of “watch band” iPod Nano wrist straps will soon flood the market. Perhaps iPod Nano necklace holders will, too.

AirPlay looks cool – I want to try it out and see how easily I can stream content from one iDevice to another, iTunes 10 still needs a massive “ease of use” redesign so multiple tasks can be much more easily accomplished at the same time, along with better management of libraries – but there’s always iTunes 11 or 12 for that to happen.

Continued on page two, please read on!