Apple Revamps Entire iPod Lineup
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
By Paul Wagenseil
/www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,295837,00.html As expected, Apple's Steve Jobs introduced a touchscreen iPod Wednesday, one that looks almost exactly like the iPhone — but without the phone.
Dubbed the iPod Touch, the device has a 3.5-inch full-color screen, Cover Flow music-browsing software and a photo library.
It also has Wi-Fi wireless networking abilities, which could undercut one of the big selling points of the iPhone.
In fact, the new iPod has many things the iPhone has — the Safari Web browser, a special YouTube application — and one thing it doesn't: the ability to wirelessly download songs from iTunes.
Jobs said the iPhone Touch would use flash-based memory, with price points at $299 for 8 gigabytes of storage and $399 for 16 gigs. It hits stores later this month.
To further compound the chagrin for early adopters of the iPhone , the price of the 8-gigabyte iPhone was cut from $599 to $399 — and the 4-gigabyte one, which had been priced at $499, was eliminated altogether.
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Jobs hit the stage at the Moscone West exhibition center in San Francisco announcing the revamping of the entire iPod line, from Shuffle to full iPod.
The iPod Nano caught up to the "full" iPod with a color 320 x 240 screen to show video, widening the device's face but not making it appreciably thicker. Also bundled into it were three video games, including Sudoku.
The regular brick-like iPod, the one with an old-fashioned hard drive, got a serious storage boost and a new name: the iPod Classic.
The 80-gigabyte iPod will now cost $249, formerly the price of the 30-gig model, which is gone. Replacing the 80-gig model at the $349 price point is one with a whopping 160 gigs of storage — enough for 40,000 songs of average length.
The iPod shuffle got a smaller update — the 1-gigabyte model's price got kicked down to $79, and a PRODUCT (RED) model, matching an earlier Nano, was added as part of the widespread African-relief campaign.
Also demonstrated was a new iTunes feature that lets user "build" their own ringtones from a library of 500,000 songs.
Apple Revamps iPod
