Apple has a media event later today (10am PDT), and is likely to be announcing new iPods today, along with possibly some iPhone news (2.1 firmware). iTunes 8, and other rumored stuff.

Live news feeds are here, or here.

Whoo hooo! Let's ignore the mac users! (Sorry. My powerbook self-destructed, and my macbook pro money is burning a hole in my pocket.)

Latest rumors say the nano's getting accelerometers so it can transition to landscape mode for videos, along with other cool probably useless tricks.

An ipod touch classic that falls under the back to school promo will get me down to the apple store today to buy a macbook. I'm not holding my breath.

The various pictures floating around of the allegedly new Nano don't look very suitable for landscape though.

Why's that? If those images are accurate, with the nano held vertically the screen is taller than it is wide, unlike all nanos and classics before it. It stands to reason that you'd want to watch videos in landscape (ie: holding the new nano horizontally).

Hrm. Looked smaller in the pics I saw before. Guess it is okay.

Looks like 2.1 is scheduled for Friday for iPhone users, though no mention of the push service. I wonder if that got delayed. Overall, nothing really big out of the event, and as expected it was only iPod related.

Another year, another round of iPod updates, and another batch of features left out of previous models. In a way, I do like that MS keeps revving the firmware on their entire family of products. At least the iPhones are being kept in the upgrade loop for now.

Oh, and it looks like Apple is going to seriously try to compete in the handheld gaming market, with this comment out of Jobs during the keynote "It's the best portable device for playing games."

I assume that it'll be in a similar fashion to how even a couple of percent of market penetration is counted as a big success like the iPhone?

Okay, I thought I'd write down my thoughts on the event as I read Engadget's live blog. As you might expect from me, I'm underwhelmed. I'm sure I'll start getting blasted for any number of the following (some of it is admittedly nit-picky):

Thoughts as I read the live blog:

- I'm just not into the whole "suggest other songs like what you're listening to." I think it's pretty obvious that this is first and foremost a means to push more music sales.

- Is that the only new thing in iTunes 8? 7 saw far more than that between point releases, like iPhone support and the apps store.

- $2.99 for a single HD TV show? Seriously? I still maintain that everything in the iTunes store is twice as expensive as it should be.

- Poor Steve, looking seriously frail. That procedure really caused havoc on him. Hope his malnurishment issues get straightened out.

- Neat, new nano looks just like the spy shots. Has an accelerometer. The only thing that worries me is the curved screen. The addition of the curve and glass covering mean that I suspect it'll have some pretty bad glare issues, but I hope I'm wrong. I just think the curvature will make it hard to tilt it out of glare...

- And of course the oval shape instantly creates a whole new market of accessories. Hopefully dock inserts are being made for all those docks that have them.

- Are they STILL using Napolean Dynamite for these things? I like that movie less and less with every mention of it. I'm sure there have been other cult movies in the last four years. Juno comes to mind as a good recent one. I'm pretty sure it's in the iTunes store...

- The same applies for Beck's "Guess I'm Doing Fine," except that I LOVE that album. Still, it's going on six years...

- Nice battery life on the new nano

- Wow, that's a lot of colors. Pretty wild.

- I agree with Engadget, those included $79 earbuds are really driving the price up. Would be nice if they'd release a version without them, since I'm sure there's a lot of folks out there with their own headphones.

- Some very nice minor updates to the Touch. I like that they put the speaker in. 802.11n would be nice, but probably tough to include.

- I'm still nowhere near sold on games for the Touch and iPhone. I need physical controls. I really want to hear real-world reactions to that virtual D-pad in the Fifa game. Still, impressive graphics - NFS looks really good.

- "It's the best portable device for playing games..." Um, again, I think this is extremely difficult to claim. It doesn't even have games that use the touchscreen to the best effect.

- Jack Johnson. Might be the biggest iTunes seller ever, but I could care less.

- That's all? Okay...

If you take out all the filler, you see how Apple can create a spectacle around one new product, an (IMO) minor addition to iTunes, and a slight revamp of the Touch. I'm not complaining about the event because I was expecting more, I'm complaining because I feel that if you're going to have an event like this where supposed "journalists" clap and cheer for everything you announce, there should at least be something big to share.

And that's another thing that bothers me. Journalists shouldn't be cheering for product releases. I thought they were supposed to be objective.

Anyway, let the flames commence...

*edit*
One more note on the Touch and iPhone as gaming devices: it's true that they have better graphics than any other portable gaming device out there, and the power inside to match, but I think the press is forgetting something: the DS and the PSP are nearly four years old. That's ancient. All I'm saying is: watch out, Apple, you don't want to be another Dreamcast.

I agree, completely underwhelming and given the drop in share price, the market seems to agree to.

Steve Jobs looks worse than ever, this is only going to fuel rumours that there is something serious going on with his health.

I guess 28% US smartphone marketshare, and 6.5% worldwide marketshare (from Feburary 2008) isn't a big success in your mind for some reason. For an initial product launch, I'd say that was pretty good. And no numbers have been released yet with the 3G now rolling out to a much larger worldwide audience.

The iPhones are selling at a much quicker pace then the iPods did at their launch. But, I suppose the iPod isn't a success either

Welcome to the UK. Hope you enjoy your stay. Sorry everything is crazy expensive on the iTunes store.


Do you still get the bundled dock insert with Nanos?


What are they included with?


Volume controls on the side of the thing are the big thing IMO. Having to yank it out of your pocket to adjust the volume is a pain.


Yeah. No real buttons is a big thing for me. I doubt it'd make even a tiny dent in Nintendo's revenue but its probably some worry for Sony since the iPods/iPhones are more aimed at the higher end expensive market.

It may be powerful and have a nice touchscreen display but if your games are crap then its still pointless. The PSP has nice hardware and it has hardware buttons but they're still nowhere near what Nintendo have achieved with significantly less.


Who?


Apple have a knack for getting its to be blunt fanboys all into a frenzy over pretty much nothing.

No. I mean how originally it was that if they even captured a few percentage of the worldwide phone market then they'd be happy. Not that I don't think that they've been successful.

Well, the rumors can't get much worse than a report that he was dead...

Actually, people already know about his health issues (that they know at all was a bit of a controversy too). He looks like that because of the "Whipple" procedure he had done, which apparently has a side effect of either malnourishment or malnutrition, I can't remember which one, but I think it's the latter.

I'm not really feeling the new iPod Touch except for use as a development platform. I really thought it would bundle GPS. That would have been quite killer, but I can understand the desire for Apple to have a larger gap between the iPhone and iPod Touch.

I can't recall how Apple positioned iTunes 7 when it launched 2 years ago, but I definitely recall that the reason I liked it (and started using it) was due to all the small changes that weren't actively marketed, such as the ability to readily group tracks into Albums when viewing.

Versions of iTunes prior to 7 were pretty much a complete nightmare for managing a large music collection. I'd dare to say practically useless in fact.

I'm hoping that there are similar subtle changes to iTunes 8 in addition to the big-story stuff that everyone saw in the presentation. I can get "Genius" recommendations from Last.FM already.

I haven't finished downloading 8 yet, but I'm getting a little worried they may have removed some functionality going by the couple of screenshots I've seen....


Oh, and while I didn't watch the press event or even read about it live, Jack Johnson is awesome. I'd have a very hard time believing he's #1 on any iTunes lists though as I was under the impression he was relatively unknown (not much of a following in the US as I recall)

EDIT: Damn, I got Rick-rolled by Apple. The iTunes 8 download link netted me a copy of iTunes 7.7.1. Argh, 55MB for nothing.

Seems he's popular all over the world. God knows why.

The first I'd heard of him was on all of Sonos' marketing images. His album was used on the controller for a long time as the default image. Coincidentally, the default image on their current marketing materials now belongs to an album by G. Love, a friend of Jack Johnson and artist on Johnson's own label.

I started listening to him only because of the airplay some of his songs from the Curious George soundtrack got in Portugal (while I was on vacation). I recognized the name and had some additional listening time when I got back.

In addition to a few nice interface tweaks in iTunes 8, Apple also messed up a few things for no apparent reason.

The good:
-The list view can now show/hide the album art which used to require 2 different views
-You can now set the Sort tags when multi-editing metadata (the UI used to only appear when editing a single track)
-New grid view

The Lame:
-Some items in prefs have been moved around for no reason
-When multi-editing tracks, the compilation tag is now on an OPTIONS tab, a different place than when editing a single track
-A number of other tags on the options tab should probably be on the primary info tab to make for faster editing
-New grid view has no sorting options (it has options for what to show, just not how)
-New grid has no options to change the displayed cover size
-There's a "video" tab when editing metadata for files that are not video files
-No new metadata supported (I'm really after TLAN ID3 for Language and proper multi-genre support)
-Genius requires an iTunes account

The Windows x86 version link gave me 8.0. Not tried the OSX one.

From what I can tell, these earphones aren't packaged in with anything. You have to fork out another $79 for them.

Meanwhile, Apple supposedly announced that the iTunes Store now had TV shows in HD. I punched it up on my AppleTV and, while the NBC shows are now up, and the icons for them say things ("Now in SD and HD"), there's no "buy now in HD" button anywhere to be seen. One can assume this is going to be rolled out soon.

I "successfully" downloaded iTunes 8 from Apple, which then required me to update my Quicktime to version 7.7.5 or something along those lines.

If I try using either the Genius feature or the iTunes store, my iTunes is consistently crashing, so that's not terribly encouraging. If I turn all that crap off, it otherwise seems to work.

About 60 seconds after I wrote about getting the wrong iTunes version, I tried again and Apple's site had been updated with the new file.

After reading a bit more about the new touch I'm even less impressed than initially.

Major features that didn't come to the touch:

GPS
Camera
More storage - I was expecting a bump to 64GB on the top end

I certainly didn't expect them all, but thought at least one would be forthcoming.

I might pick up an old one as a development/test machine since I don't really have a need for a portable audio device unless it can hold my entire library. I also don't have a need for a photo viewer that has no way to take photos or pull them from a camera or camera card directly. Moving photos from your computer to the touch is only semi-useful. To tote around to show other people snaps. Not as functional as the device could be with a more convergent design.

I think Apple were content to let this thing just keep on going (don't mess with a good thing) and hope to really exploit it as a vehicle for the AppStore. You don't need the major features I mentioned to make this into a killer handheld gaming device, albeit one without any hard buttons. Plenty of opportunity for a large number of killer applications and utilities as well, even without decent location services.

Still would have been nice to see a 5mp image sensor and flash on there though.

I think that was one of the biggest things missing from the iPhone 3G.

This alone makes the upgrade for me.


The options are there, they're just not in the same place as the "what" options. The "how" options are over in the "View" menu.


There's that little slider in the upper right for changing size (like iPhoto).


That one definitely looks like a bug, but on the plus side you can now change the file types that iTunes thinks something is. For example, I can download an MP3, put it in iTunes, then change the type to "Audiobook" and have iTunes treat it like an audiobook. This previously required AppleScript hacking or something. The big missing feature here now is that I still can't change a Podcast to "Music" or vice versa.

iTunes has always been a huge interface mess, and this update fixes a few inconsistencies, but probably adds just as many more.

I didn't expect GPS or camera, but I agree that more storage would have been a good thing. I, too, have no use for a device that can't hold my entire music collection. I guess the problem is that solid-state memory is still expensive these days.



Or which doesn't EXIF-rotate the photos properly when they're sent to the device. This is STILL A BUG that I can reproduce over and over again. I'll try again with 8.0 (which is downloading in the background right now) but it's not promising.

Strangeness: I plugged my iPhone into the computer to sync and charge, then went to bed. While falling asleep, I heard the chime of my Mac rebooting. This morning, iTunes is up again, and it's complaining about tunes of mine not actually being there, while in fact they were.

Very strange. There was no evidence of what in the logs. It was just humming along like normal and then there were log events for the machine while it was rebooting.

My only hypothesis is that something went wrong with my external Firewire drive. That could have caused iTunes to be unable to find the music files and could also have induced the reboot. The state, in the morning, was that all of the files that were to have been synced had a "!" next to them, even though they were all there. Click on one and it played the track just fine.

iTunes, naturally, once it decided the files were unavailable has no way for me to have it do a bulk rescan or anything. (Does it?) Nor will it bother to check again if I try to sync again. *sigh*

What is odd about the new prices is the difference in how much Apple is charging for more space. I'd imagine the same flash chips are going into all three devices.

8gb Nano to 16gb Nano = $50
8gb Touch to 16gb Touch = $70
8gb Phone to 16gb Phone = $100

After watching the event and playing around with iTunes 8, I'm looking forward to using the Genius feature on the phone. Pandora has been great for playing "I'm in this mood" music when I have WiFi, but on the go being able to do the same with my collection will be handy. I could do similar with a bunch of playlists, but having it done on the fly and automatically is really useful.

Still nothing about 2.1 for the iPhone including push service or not.

I'm having some issues with iTunes 8 and Vista. It seems the USB driver it uses is a bit weird and causes mysterious crashes. iTunes 7.5 worked perfectly.

Marketing I guess.

The iPhone and iPod touch are different though in how they have their flash. The iPod touch has space for 2 chips on the PCB. The iPhone has space for only 1 chip on the PCB. Apple buys prestacked (like the old manual empeg RAM upgrade) chips directly from the manufacturer along with the regular single type. This is the reason why the iPhone is 1/2 the capacity of the iPod touch.

The Nano and iPhone I'd assume use the same arrangement of chips and types so there shouldn't be actually any technical reason why its an extra $50. There is a technical difference between an iPod touch and an iPhone however.

Don't even get me started on iTunes inept file tracking and scanning "abilities."

iTunes is decent and does quite a bit very well, but there are subtle problems that can become major issues for some people. I've been bitted quite a few times with it not knowing where some files were located. There was no way to fix other than to manually point it to the correct location for each track, one at a time.

There was also no way to get it to do a complete scan to tell me which tracks had this problem. Only by clicking on a track would it scan and then display the exclamation point. With 20k tracks this means I had anywhere from 1 to a nightmare-level of tracks it no longer knew the location for. My only choice was to toss the whole DB and just drag all the files over to iTunes again.

This has happened multiple times and each time there was no change to the drive the songs were on. This may be exacerbated by not keeping tracks on the local HD. It's happened on an external drive as well as a network share (whose mount point looks just like any other drive to most applications).

I used to also keep the iTunes database (yes, I know that's a misnomer) on the external/network drive with the music so that I could access it from any Mac by pointing iTunes on that machine to it. This worked very well for a long time with the music connected to another Mac on the network. Connected to a Windows machine not so much. The datafiles are also not compatible with the Windows version of iTunes, including the hard-paths it records for the music.

I've resorted to just keeping the iTunes DB local to the machine that's to run iTunes and the music where it's always been. Let's see if that improves anything. The issue with this setup is that when new music is added to the music drive every iTunes installation that access it will have to re-add the entire drive and discover which songs are new and which it already knows about.

Interested in any tips if anyone has better ideas. It takes a long (long) time to populate iTunes with all my tracks the first time around. I'm about to do it tonight before going to bed for the new iTunes 8. I just wiped the DB last night.

Can't iTunes access other running iTunes instances?

You can only stream I believe. It won't let you do anything else like dragging it to a local iPod. There is also a limit on how many different clients can stream in a day.

I'd wait for them to release iTunes 8.0.1. Too much flakiness in this release.

Yeah, right. I remember getting excited when RAM for my PC dropped to just $50 per megabyte. That's 5,000 times more expensive than it is today. I guess it is expensive if you compare it pound for pound with water or something...

tanstaafl.

That's how much I paid for memory in my first PC back in 1995. $1600 for 32MB to be exact. I don't even want to think about how much I paid to outfit my Amiga 3000 with 16MB and my previous Amiga with 8MB. Ouch.

That being said, they should still slap 64GB into an iPod touch and 32GB into a Nano. It's the only respectable thing to do. And then release an iPod Touch Max with that new Toshiba 240GB 1.8" HD.

I'd probably be happier to see a camera and GPS added to the Touch though, since as mentioned, I don't really have a need for a portable music device myself.

Another iTunes 8 bug. I lost the ability to control my AppleTv via Itunes from my MacBook. The fix was to go into the Security settings and change it to allow specific programs and then add iTunes to the list. The default of essential services wouldn't allow itunes to communicate with the AppleTv. Seem like iTunes 8 may have been rushed to market...

Totally believable. I don't have any insider knowledge, but I suspect that some of the iTunes team must have been busy in the past two years working on other projects. A bunch of back-end patches have been made to versions 7.x to support the new devices, but nothing much in terms of general features. I'd hardly call what's in 8.0 a heavy load of new additions either. Definitely not something they've been cooking since 7 came out.

People may want to check out Songbird if they're able to run it on their system. Seems like it's a decent music app modeled after iTunes in many ways. Open source however, so it definitely won't do Apple-ecosystem stuff like control an AppleTV. They do have iPod sync support for some models though.

Yea, I took a quick look at Songbird a few months ago. It was still very rough around the edges then. I may take another look now just for curiosities' sake.

Has the Vista + USB issue been resolved yet? Apple might want to slow things down a bit just to sort out the quality control issues. Things are starting to add up in that department.

Just be glad you're not running Leopard on a PPC machine like my PowerBook. It's multiple weekly Mail and Safari crashes. Once every few weeks one of them can bring down the finder and even prevent the machine from restarting or shutting down properly. That's on top of all the small bugs in nearly every single app that comes with the OS (including the Finder) and of course the many annoyances due to design issues.

Still a thousand times better than Vista though. I can't believe anyone can run that OS full time. I helped out a friend by installing and uninstalling some stuff on his new Vista system over the weekend. Wow, that OS is an ugly, unusable, bloated piece of crap. And companies like HP should be sued into bankruptcy for shipping systems with that much crapware installed on them.

The best thing to do would be to install a clean OS, but I wasn't about to do that for them. I've heard too many horror stories about trying to get all the hardware on cheap PC notebooks recognized by Windows.

What worst about the crapware, is how difficult it is to cleanly remove it. But it's well worth the effort to get a clean os install.

Are you sure something deeper isn't wrong? I've been running Leopard since release at work on a Mac Mini. Initially it was an Intel Mini for 2 months, then I took the Time Machine drive and restored it to a PowerPC Mini where it continues to run. It even is an upgrade install of Leopard on top of Tiger. In that time, I can't say I have ever seen any crashes like you describe. And my main use of the box is Safari, Mail, Adium, Linkinus, Perforce, and TextWrangler. I'll check tomorrow for crash logs, but from my experience the apps to crash have been minor Adium issues.

You're not seeing Safari taking up memory and freeing up next to none of it (both real and virtual)? Maybe it's the pages I'm loading. I notice especially how any activity on one tab can completely bring the whole browser to a standstill with a spinning beach ball such that you can't do anything in any other part of the program.

Closing the tab for the default Slim Center Interface can sometimes take 30 seconds or more.

I immediately noticed Safari response and hanging issues when I updated from the 3.0 beta to the final release. Every update since then hasn't been much better. At least most of the issues that resulted in some pages producing an error have been eliminated - The error wasn't a page issue because if you reloaded 3 or 4 times you'd get the page. A lot of people had that problem as it's documented up and down the net, I just can't remember what the error was right now.

With Mail it's not anything specific from what I can tell. It can just crash while sitting there. It's done this since I first installed Leopard, though not on any type of regular schedule. Mail also takes longer in Leopard to show folder contents. Of course it can crash when I'm closing a message composition window, or even just switching folders.

I have no doubt this Leopard install is completely bunged, but that's a Leopard thing, not an issue with my hardware/system. Repair permissions took 30 hours when I last did it 3 weeks ago.

Ideally I'd like to buy a new Intel machine and then install Tiger on this one. While my Intel mini doesn't see the kind of use as this PowerBook, I've never experienced a crash running Leopard on it. Just have to put up with the same smaller bugs and design issues.

You might want to wait until next month, provided the burning sensation is tolerable until then. I'm in the MBP market as well, and am hoping for a significant revision.

Exactly, iPod events are always just about iPods. Never has a Mac, portable or otherwise, been announced at a special iPod event. Macs are announced at trade shows or their own events. iPod design refreshing is done once per year, but something less significant such as a memory/HD bump can happen again at a later time.

People forget that there are always two notebook refreshes per year. Excluding announcements at Macworld in January, these are usually in the spring and fall. Take a look at the history of announcements over the past 8 years if you don't believe me. The biggest announcements have tended to be done in January at the Macworld keynote.

I have had some issues with Safari like that, but generally only after leaving it open for more then a day, with a tab on a page that refreshes every 15 seconds. Memory is pretty tight on the Mini since it only has 1GB total, but restarting Safari once a day seems to ensure this is not a problem. Safari 2 had a definite noticeable memory issue with the refreshing page, and 3 did improve it a lot for me. And generally when Safari is getting fussy, it would only beachball for a bit if I opened a new tab to load a new site.

I just checked my crash logs, and it looks like these go back to January of 08, around the time I restored using the image from the Intel Time Machine backup.

Apple Processes
1 crash in Finder
1 crash in iCal Helper
1 crash in Mail (with 3 bundles loaded, GrowlMail, Mailtags and Widemail)
10 crashes in ManagedClient
7 crashes in mdworker
1 crash in nmblookup
1 system panic in smbfs

3rd Party Processes
11 crashes in Adium
1 crash in GrowlHelper
5 crashes in LCCDaemon (Logitech)
4 crashes in Microsoft Sync Services
1 crash in P4V
2 crashes in Quicksilver
9 crashes in Remote Desktop Connection
1 crash in SynergyKM

For Mail, I use it many times a day, have 1.8gigs of e-mail across 2.5 years, and use 28 smart folders of various complexity to manage it. In addition to the one actual crash, I can recall a few times I've had to restart Mail from it being in a bad state, usually just spinning some thread in a loop talking to the Exchange server via IMAP. Never had it explode on me just by changing folders or composing mail.

I've been running leopard on a powerbook G4 (1.5Ghz) since release day (fresh install).

7 Crashes in safari
9 Crashes in quicktime player
1 iTunes crash
1 iPhoto crash
1 Xcode crash

And that's about it. I can't ever recall seeing mail crash under leopard (or tiger) and I don't think I've ever seen finder crash either.

Adrian

It's a raging internal debate. I'm a university employee so eligible for the back to school special. I'm tempted to buy a bare bones MB and get the touch free after rebate, then sell the MB when MBPs come out. Given the resale value and academic discount, I suspect I wouldn't come out that far behind.

On the other hand, I can keep The Loaner from work, and suffer with the 1.3Ghz Celeron M for a month or two, depending on how soon the really cool MBPs are available.

BTW anyone else with a Touch wonder why Apple can get away with selling a 7GB iPod as an 8GB?

I haven't installed anything on it yet and there's obviously the overhead of 100MB or so shown by iTunes, leaving me with only 6.91GB free. It still says right at the top and in the meter, that this is a 7GB iPod.

Has anyone launched a class-action lawsuit regarding this yet? How about for hard drives in general? It used to be this crap flew only with HDs but now it's being used for flash devices as well.

But with the this iPod, accounting for 1 million byte Gigas should still leave one with a 7.8GB iPod.

I'm game to jump into a class action suit for a few bucks back and to finally get manufacturers to top up their storage to actually match what they advertise.

As I also said previously about the iPhone keyboard, it's IMPOSSIBLE to join a wireless network with a decent passphrase using the iPod/iPhone. Because you can't see what you're typing there's no way to know if you've made a mistake and no way to correct it.

Hiding password fields on a handheld device is an absolutely idiotic design decision. Thank god this is a development machine and there are some good apps, because lately, when it comes to design, Apple has had their heads up their collective arses.

Its 8 real GB worth of flash in there. Not all of it is used for music storage. The OS alone is nearly 300MB by itself. Add on formatting overhead. Data files used to manage your music etc...

From Wikipedia:
There has been lawsuit cases about it, like this one against WDC. Pretty much the result has been every storage product now has tiny print saying 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. It's even in small print on the back of my iPhone box.

8,000,000,000 / 1024 /1024 / 1024 ~= 7.4GB. OS size, plus probably a bit extra for future growth accounts for the 6.9GB usable for storage.

My number one annoyance is that SMS privacy can only be enabled when passcode is enabled.

Why isn't this option available regardless of whether passcode is enabled?

You *can* see what you're typing, at least on an iPhone and I'm assuming the Touch is similar. As you're entering the character, it displays next to your finger for a brief moment so you can see what's being entered. It's an important feature because while relying on spell checking for emails is fine, it's worthless for passphrases.

Thing is, NAND capacity isn't doubling every year - more like 18 months or so. The Touch is like the last-gen one, in that there are two spots for NAND packages (each of which has 8 NAND die in it), and the biggest NAND packages money can buy are currently still only 16GB... so 32GB is your maximum.

The only way to get 64GB right now is to find space for 4 packages, or a total of 32 NAND die!

Hugo

It's the same as HDDs... that'd be 8GB of "unformatted capacity". When you format it's pretty much like a HDD, ie 8GB = 8,000,000,000 bytes, or 7.45GiB (divide by 2^30). Subtract from that the OS (ISTR it's about 400MB?) and some databases and 6.91GB sounds believable. The chips are sold as 8GB chips by every NAND vendor.

It's always been this case for flash, have a look at the actual capacity of the average 2GB SD card, for example.

It's not so easy to "top up" the capacity - that'd be adding another chip to the board unless every NAND vendor - Samsung, Toshiba, Hynix, Micron, Intel, etc - agreed to add capacity to their die. Nobody is going to go out on a limb and do this in isolation, as it makes their NAND more expensive to make compared to the competition, and they're probably not exactly making piles of money on the current pricing...

Hugo
(speaking for himself, not anyone else)

Is it? My iPhone shows the last character typed (as opposed to a blob) so you can easily check what you're typing into a password field. The character only gets hidden when you type the next character.

Not releasing your finger from the keyboard allows you to check the key you're going to enter too, as you can see the popup. Only let go when the right character is showing.

Hugo

Even with both of those features, it's still incredibly hard to correctly type a long secure WPA key made up of hexadecimal numbers. More than about 6-8 characters and it gets nearly impossible. When they key gets really long, without the ability to look back and check what you typed already, you make a lot of mistakes. There's also the issue of the caps lock that doesn't "stick" when you go back and forth from the numeric pad. If your WPA key is all capital letters plus numbers (as it would be with a hexadecimal WPA key), then you end up leaving in the occasional lower case letter and the key doesn't work.

Split the key up into groups of 4-5 digits each then. You should be able to keep that many digits in your head at once.

Of course you can do that. In a quiet room with no distractions with unlimited time. But what if you are in a hurry, you get interrupted, or the WPA key is very long?

I swear there was this one WPA key that was many digits long and I literally tried entering it (unsuccessfully) on three separate occasions, and only got it to work on the fourth day. Admittedly, each day I tried it was only because I was stopping by the office for a minute to pick someone up. I had the key and wanted to check my email real quick while I waited for the passenger to get their stuff together. But each time, I had at least a few minutes, which should have been plenty to punch in a WPA key, even a long one.

For the laptop? Check the "show characters" box. Paste the key from the file I had, or type it in from a piece of paper. Done in seconds. iPhone? A few minutes' attempt each on four different days, and only on the fourth day was I successful.

You guys all talk like it's easy. Fine, you try it. Generate a random hexadecimal number that is 26 ascii characters long. Make sure all of the letters in it are upper case. Make that your router's WPA key. Write it down on a piece of paper. Now try punching that into an iPhone's WPA key field without making a mistake. Remember, the letters are case sensitive.

Sure you can do it, but after you're successful, note just how long it took you, how many attempts you made, and how much concentration it took to accomplish. Did you have to be in a quiet room with no one bothering you? Did you get distracted by anything? Did you ever have to stop and then count how many dots were on the screen and then count the letters on your piece of paper?

Now, try entering that same number into the iPhone's "notepad" applet, where you can see what you're typing as you do it. Sure, it's a pain, but not nearly as much of a pain as it was when the characters were hidden.

Its a WPA key. How often do you type these things in? Okay, it might be annoying to do the first time and require some concentration to do so but you're done after that.

Every 2-4 days when I'm travelling.

Any device that hides what one is typing from the person typing it is totally brain-dead.

Cheers

You mean like virtually every password field on every system ever?

Yes.

At least on the desktop you can sometimes reveal the password. Hiding is fine for most short passwords where you have a real keyboard. It's desirable when in front of a big screen where someone can look over your shoulder.

It's not desirable on the iPhone screen. My WPA password is 40-something characters and I know the whole thing from memory. Showing the last character I typed for a split second isn't helping much. That's because I have to actively look at where I'm putting my fingers, unlike a real keyboard. So at most I see that some character was displayed, but I don't even notice what it was.

I finally got the password entered, but I also had to cycle the WPA modes on my router to get it to work. I finally ended up where I wanted. I did this based on some recommendations found on the net as a couple of times I cold swear (and did out loud) that I had typed it in correctly, but still wasn't able to connect. It's not like you get any feedback about why the connection didn't work.

I only wish that was my only complaint with the UI and stock software that comes on the Touch/iPhone. If it were all *MY* software, I'd consider it a version .6 or .7 at the most. Still a ways away from 1.0. Don't even get me started on the actual music playback iPod software. Argh, it's as brain dead as the old Nano software and doesn't even include search for crying out loud. Apple must expect that people don't keep more than 10 or 20 songs on these things, because that's what the UI is designed for.

I have never understood why it's like that.

I mean if you are crafty enough to see it on the screen surely you could just watch my fingers as they type?

I always tick the box to reveal the password if there is one, I am more than capable of either punching the person in the face (read - politely telling them to go away) or changing my password if I think someone knows what it is.

Cheers

Cris.

Too bad you can't plug in the earbuds and have it speak the passphrase before submitting it.

This is why I use WPA/Enterprise!