Just been watching the Apple event live and there's some very nice new stuff.

New iPod Nano with a 3cm x 3cm touch screen ... and that's it.

The entire thing is the size of the touch screen. It has a clip on the back also.

New iPod touch with front and rear (HD) camera. Even thinner than before.

new Apple TV which is about the size of a Jacob's cream cracker. Streaming HD movies, TV, etc... very nice.

New iTunes 10. With "Ping" which is their own take on the music oriented social network.

All in all a good round up I think.

Some interesting updates there, particularly the iPod nano.

That Nano looks pretty cool.

I saw that Apple TV is renting and streaming only.

http://www.iphonedownloadblog.com/2010/ ... tting-one/

I'm pretty interested in the Apple TV -at $99 with the ability to stream anything from my Mac it sounds great.

I doubt I would use it to rent stuff from the iTunes store, though.

Yeah, also from netflix, youTube and other online sources.

What I don't understand about the AppleTV is that they say it doesn't have onboard storage, but you can download HD rentals and have up to 30 days to view it - so where does it store it if you don't watch it immediately? I'm confused! Or do you download it to your Mac and stream it from there?

I'm tempted, but the $99 shouldn't translate to £99 over here, whatever exchange rate you use. When the US price was announced, I was thinking it would be either £79 or £89 - but £99 is taking the p!ss a bit. Yes, it's cheaper than the old model, but simply switching the $ for a £ isn't good. I suppose they're preparing for the VAT rise next year?

From what I understood it's streaming only.

i.e. you rent a movie and watch it tomorrow... by streaming it.

You can buy stuff to store onto your mac/PC and then stream from there onto your AppleTV but that isn't the same as renting.

Even so, $99 = £64, give or take. Add on VAT, say £75. £80 for a bit of extra profit. £100? Piss off.

Anyway, I've got a first gen and the second gen has absolutely nothing going for it other than it's black and smaller. By every other possible measure, my V1 AppleTV is better than the V2.

RE: the rest. You don't cache anything. That's the point. It's entirely streamed. It doesn't matter if you rent it and want to watch it later, the rental period doesn't start until you start playing the movie. Then you can stop & pick up where you like as long as the rental period hasn't expired. There's no need to cache anything, assuming you have a permanent internet connection anyway. Not that we're going to get that of course. No netflix for us obviously and I doubt we'll be getting cheap rental of HD films or 79p TV show rental any time soon either.

I found the whole thing hugely underwhelming. The new iPod shuffle basically says 'we know, the last one was a useless piece of crap, god knows what we were thinking, here have the old one back'. The new Nano is less nice to hold than the old one, will be of no use for sports people and seems to have lost the camera. And why do you have to manually turn the screen if you turn it around, what's wrong with putting in a mercury switch? iTunes 10 appears to only add this facebook/myspace clone which assumes you and your friends have the same tastes and then uses it as a way to improve Apple's targetted selling to you. The new iPod touch was the most predictable thing since Tony Blair's autobiography insisted he was right about everything and airplay is something you can already get on the App store for a couple of quid. The only thing - genuinely the only thing - that impressed me was Epic's third person sword fighting fantasy thing. Very impressive tech on a phone that was. Even then it was conspicuously empty.

Bad. Just... bad.

So, apart from that, what did you think, Jon?

Given the quality of iPlayer the last couple of nights, streaming from the web would not give a proper, full HD picture. There is just too much crap between Apple’s servers and my network to make it a goer. Looks like I‘d have to buy from Apple and download and then stream from a desktop.

AppleTV has been interesting - just for playing my own content, but this version seems a bit half-witted not to even include some form of local storage.

Although I agree Jon, I wonder if Apple have just looked at the American market. Are US broadband speeds better than UK speeds? Are they more capable of streaming this without errors?

I dont like the new nano tbh. The last one had a mini widescreen (320x240). Ok you wouldnt want to watch a whole movie on it but for a 20 minute bus ride it was good.

The stream of the press conf itself apparently wasn't HD (didn't look it anyway) and it had some stuttering problems with me here on the office network, which is considerably faster than your average home broadband.

Jon

If it takes off here, a lot of folks are going to hit their caps very quickly.

Press conf is now up on iTunes for those that want to watch it.