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AA's Apple Coverage:
Check out our review of the new iPod Nano Check out our review of the new iTunes, iTunes 9
Top 5 iPhone and iPod Touch Apps
1. Shazam-
Identify music anywhere: from the radio, TV, film, or in a store by
simply holding your iPhone towards the music and tapping "tag."
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Rather listen to the interview? Click Here AA: Eddy- I've looked at the new iTunes and I love it. I especially like the new features with music where things have really been added on a few things with bonus artwork and content and things like that. It kind of makes it so you have a physical copy of a record... except it's digital. EC: One of the new features that you're talking about there is iTunes LP. And some of us are old enough to remember what buying a record was like. In the fact that you got this great, big, album that had lyrics, liner notes, and photos. And that kind of went away as the CD came about and certainly with digital music. We really wanted to bring it back to those fans, but even more introduce it to a whole new generation of fans. We wanted to take advantage of the things we can do with iTunes, like including videos. One of the great things about doing something like this is when you put it in the hands of artists, they do things that you can't even think about. In the case of Dave Matthews he took the LP and actually hand-drew everything that's in the LP himself. Tyreese, one of the artists on iTunes decided he wanted to create a comic book that went along with his song. He created an LP, that has lyrics and notes, but also has a comic book along with it. Like we've done that for music, we did the same thing for movies. In that you can include things like deleted scenes and extras right from within a movie that you buy on iTunes. If you're familiar with DVD extras and things like that you get all that stuff and even some extras in some cases. AA: What I also like with the new version of iTunes is the new Home Sharing Feature. What can you tell me about that? EC: I have kids and my wife and we all have computers. One of the challenges that we've had is one of us buys a movie or buys a song, and wants to share it with somebody else in our house. There's been no easy way to do that. We've had sharing where you can stream music. But with home sharing what you can do now on up to five computers in your house, is login with your iTunes account. And let's suppose I login in with my account and my wife has already turned on home sharing with my account also. I can see her library and all the songs that she has. And I can even say 'just show me the songs that she has in her library that I don't have in mine.' And when I see a song or an album that I like, I just take it drag it over to my library and it just copies it right over. And if we happen to have really similar tastes all the time. I can even say 'anytime she buys a song' automatically copy it into my library. That's a great way to share that I think our customers are going to love. AA: That's super convenient, and the other thing that I noticed that's really convenient with the new iTunes happens to be the better synching with the iPhone. What can you tell me with the what you've tried to implement with that? EC: Before we do the apps. I think one of the things that customers are doing now, is that they're not just transferring songs. They're transferring songs, movies, TV shows, podcasting, audio books, iTunes gives you a lot of content. And what we've done is we've made it very easy to be in auto-sync mode like you have been for music. But actually, you can do some manual overrides to that. So if there's a particular movie that you love and just always want on your iPod Touch, you can do that very easy with new syncing. Along with that, we've sold over 1.8 Billion applications to iPhone and iPod Touch customers. And so they've got a lot of pages of applications, and we wanted to make it really easy for them to organize those apps. With iTunes 9, you now see all the pages that you have on your phone or on your iPod Touch right in iTunes. You can drag, for example you can say I want all my games on one page, and you can do that. It's all automatically laid out for you with iTunes 9. AA: Eddy I kind of feel like we're leaving Greg out of things so I need to ask him some questions. GJ: Glad to hear you're not forgetting about me Ryan. (laughs) AA: Wouldn't think of it! So three big iPod releases that were all pretty big yesterday. What can you tell me at those? GJ: It's actually four if you're keeping track Ryan, because we refreshed the entire line. Lets start with the two highlights, which are clearly the iPod Touch and the iPod Nano. The iPod Touch is the hottest and fastest growing category of iPod, and you know why, it's a great iPod. Fantastic for flipping through your list of songs, albums, artists, cover flow. Or taking advantages of the genius features like Genius playlists or Genius mixes. It's also great for watching videos- it's just a great iPod. It's also a great pocket computer. It's got Wi-Fi built in. It can browse the web. It can do email, it can manage your contacts and calendars, as well as all your social networking. Any of the 75,000 apps that exist in the app store make it an unbelievable pocket computer. And last but certainly not least, it's a great portable game player. There are now over 21,000 games available for the iPod Touch and the iPhone. Which is amazing. When you put that in perspective, there are about 600 available for the Sony PSP and about 3800 for the Nintendo DS, and we have over 21,000 games. And our games are killer. They have multi-touch, accelerometer, they're far less expensive, and many of them are even free. They cost you a fraction of what they cost you on these other portable game players. Which is important because as people give these away for gifts- with those other handheld players you're feeding $40 into them for new games- and here a lot of our games are free or at least very inexpensive. And of course, it is an iPod. And we've brought the price down for the iPod Touch to $199. Which is absolutely huge. We found that when we brought the iPod Mini down to $199 that our sales literally doubled. That's such a key price point. Especially as you enter the gift giving season. $199 and the affordability of the apps and the games in the app store make it a killer deal. The second big announcement was the iPod Nano. Which overall has been the best selling iPod over time and the best selling music player ever. We've sold over a hundred million of them. And what we've done with the iPod Nano is really caponized on a phenomenon that's been going on for awhile which is this amazing thing going on with spontaneous video and internet video. And as you may know there's over a billion streams of video served by YouTube every single day. A lot of that spontaneous video is being fed by pocket video cameras. They typically cost about $149 for 4GB. Well we're going to build that capability into an iPod Nano for no additional cost. For the same $149 you're going to get that video capability, higher capacity, and it's an iPod! The most popular music player. We've also added new features like FM Radio with live pause so you can pause your FM. iTunes tagging so if you like a song you can tag it, capture it, and perhaps buy it later on iTunes. And a built-in pedometer so you can keep track of how far you're going and serve that up to the Nike Plus website. We've done all this again for the same price of $149 for 8GB or $179 for 16GB. And both of those capacities are available in the most amazing colors you've ever seen. We have 9 colors that I think is the best color work we've done. AA: That is awesome. And all of the features in that Nano sound tremendous. GJ: Absolutely Killer. Then we've also updated the Shuffle line, where we've brought in a new lower priced model- $59 for 2GB. As well as bringing in color to the new iPod Shuffle. We have it now available in pink, green, blue, to go along with the black and silver. Again, that's $59 for 2GB, $79 for 4GB. Last but not least, we're bringing in the iPod Classic with even higher capacity. People with these monster music libraries can now store up to 40,000 songs. 160 GB in the same form factor with the updated iPod Classic. AA: That's huge. GJ: Absolutely. And we've also tried to bring in nice capacity points for the iPod Touch as well. We have 32 and 64 GB models for the iPod Touch as well. So people with the larger libraries can enjoy that full 3.5" multi-screen display with the accelerometer and access to over 75,000 apps. AA: Greg, I've got to wonder here. How many iPods to you use? GJ: I use them all Ryan! The nice thing is I carry them all at any given moment. You don't even know it. I've got iPods in my pocket, no one knows it. iPod Shuffle clipped on, no one knows it. I'm like walking iPod encyclopedia. AA: We need to get you an iPod utility belt. (laughs) GJ: There's no need, I just put them all in my pocket. (laughs) AA: Wrapping up this- with all the new add-ons with iPod, what's your favorite add ons with the iPod? GJ: I've got to tell you Ryan, products like the iPod Touch and the iPhone get a couple hundred new features each and every day. The reason that happens is because our app developers are creating new applications, literally hundreds a day that allow us to do things with the iPod Touch and the iPhone that a little over a year ago we'd never have dreamed of. And again, over 75,000 apps available for all of our customers through the app store. Over 1.8 Billion downloads have rewarded these developers for the work they're doing and again it gives us more capability that none of us could have ever imagined.
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