Apple's iPhone 5 Event

So you can get any of the myriad of coverage of the Coverage of Apple’s iPhone 5 Media Event at any number of locations, but here’s the short version:

• New iPhone 5, pretty much exactly as rumored. Tall and 4”, twice as fast, better cameras. Same prices as the iPhone 4S. Pre-orders Sept 14, shipping Sept 21 to the first wave of countries (US/Canada/UK/Germany/Australia/Japan/Hong Kong and Singapore). Other countries follow after.
• New iTunes, redesigned and lots of nice little features and hopefully a lot less suck. Available late October.
• iOS 6 with no huge new features available Oct 19.
• Redesigned iPod Nano (again) including bluetooth 4, iPod Shuffle the same, iPod touch basically iPhone 4S internals with the option of a 4” screen (odd that they’re keeping both body models around).
• New headphones (“ear pods”, that sounds just silly) shipping with new iPods and iPhones. Look odd, and different, claimed not to suck.

Ars Re-Reviews the Original iPod

Interesting look back at The original iPod, 10 years later in review format, over at ars technica.

Of interesting note to the "silly apple people who can't change their batteries" folks is this paragraph:

"But Jacqui," you're yelling at the screen, "aside from the hard drive and click wheel, the battery is the next most likely thing to die over time!" This does tend to be true, especially of battery tech from 10 years ago. But the original iPod in its heyday was no wimp--Apple bragged of a 10-hour battery life, which was impressive by 2001 MP3 player standards. We hardly expected to get 10 hours out of a 10-year-old battery, but when messing with our little Apple artifact, we did manage to squeeze out a solid eight hours of music jamming before it petered out. Not bad, iPod, not bad.

Not that batteries don't crap out, but maybe not as fast as you'd expect.

Apple Media Event Scheduled for September 1st

As predicted and expected, there's an Apple Media Event Scheduled for September 1st. Traditionally this is an iPod event, so I'll give my predictions:

• 128G iPod touch with Camera, Facetime
  
• iOS 4.1 to go with it with the new gaming center and the new 'facetime address by email' thing
  
• (maybe) An update to Apple TV
  

The invite clearly shows it music oriented though, and music == iPod not TV, so who knows. Andy I also his thoughts on it. I'm sure the artwork analysis and rumors of what'll be shown off will start from 2 weeks ago and finish only the second that The Steve walks off the stage Sept 1.

Apple Announcement Recap

So it's all over and it was.... pretty good, but not spectacular. Ars has a nice wrapup. Basically nothing really new, like a tablet, but:

• New iTunes 9 with enhanced cover-art, sharing, new genius stuff, and app organization, and updated store, available today
  
• New iPhone OS 3.1, available today.
  
• New 64G iPod Touch with faster processor
  
• New iPod Nano with a 640x480 video camera, FM radio, and some apps
  
• New 160G iPod Classic
  
• Lots of price changes on Touch, Nano, etc.
  

Sadly, what we don't get is a camera on the iPod Touch, and no Jesus-Tablet :(

So not a huge amount to get excited about, but a nice update to the entire lineup. Explore around Apple.com to see more details and goodness. Also pretty much every tech blog will have a similar update.