Manga about the founding of Apple Computer by Mitsuru Sugaya. Entirely in Japanese so I have only the fuzziest idea of what is going on. (Via Cult of Mac)

Before the announcement earlier today the question was, will it be the fat iPod nano, the touchscreen iPod, or what?

Turns out both the ‘fat nano’ (miniature iPod with complete video support) and the multitouch iPod are for reals! And the iPod touch has Wi-Fi! And they’re going to have a mobile iTunes store, something that was ‘obviously’ missing from the iPhone package. Hilariously enough, when you’re in a participating Starbucks store, your iPod will automatically tell you what tune Starbucks are piping in to your ears, with a button to instantly purchase it: Starbucks want to set themselves up as a music promoter!

For £199 I would personally be very tempted to get an iPod touch purely as a super-duper web browser and video player (since experience shows I spend little of my life in situations where a portable music player is in itself useful).

Compared the specs of the iPod touch with my Nokia N800 internet tablet:

• Lower screen resolution: 480×320 as opposed to 800×480.


• Closed development platform, versus a Linux operating system on the N800


• No doodle program. No mention of notes.


• No video camera (which I have not been able to make use of anyway)


• You can’t upgrade the memory; no SD Card slot


• Multi-touch rather than stylus. I would really like to not have to use the stylus.


• Better web browser: Safari versus Opera (I think); zoom to div makes text easier to read than Opera’s page zoom. More fonts. Apple's excellend Unicode support.


• iTunes rather than the bare-bones media player on the N800


• Better battery


• Easier to charge (docking station)


• Support for H.264 codec in videos, which is what hi-res videos from YouTube are in


• Support for AAC audio, so randomly chosen podcasts are more likely to work


• Copy videos by syncing with iTunes, rather than the clumsy methods I use now


• 16GB rather than 1GB (with the SD card I currently own)


• Pocket-sized rather than satchel-sized

(via Cult of Mac blog)

On the way to Shakespeare’s Globe to see Pericles, Price of Tyre yesterday, we stopped off at the Apple Store on Regent Street to look at the extremely new iPod Nano, vaguely thinking I might buy one. My thinking was that (a) I have no portable music device, having lost my Minidisc player, (b) iPod Nano is smaller than iPod, and (c) unlike iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano has a colour screen that can show photos (or experimental comic strips), which would make it slightly more useful than a music-only device.

Having handled a real unit, I have discovered that the screen is actually very small (making the photo display less attractive), and its more masculine, hard-edged, plastic shape does not fit as well in the hand as iPod Mini’s colourful, curved, brushed-metal shape. If they’d made it a little less tall and a little wider, the screen might have been slightly larger. Also, iPod Nano cannot synchronize via FireWire, but requires USB 2.0. On my compter—which has only USB 1.1—this would be very slow.

So if I want to carry my entire musci collection with me, and photos are really important to me—and I’m not yet conviced of this—the £209 iPod 20GB is the one. If music is all I care about, the £169 iPod Mini 6GB (which stocks last) has attractions over the £179 Nano 4GB, and is slightly cheaper!