New iPods

[trooperiziz]

16gb touch duly ordered!

I'll be using it mainly for podcasts and video to and from work, and wi-fi browsing whereever I can connect for free.

Hopefully the battery life will live up to the claims...

[TheLearner]

cyberface said:

TheLearner said:

£200 or poke the boy friend

Does he like that, or is that his usual fee?

He does rather :P

Still so tempting to get one of those 160Gb units, MP3 player and large portable HDD...

[Olf]

TheLearner said:

cyberface said:

TheLearner said:

£200 or poke the boy friend

Does he like that, or is that his usual fee?

He does rather :P

Still so tempting to get one of those 160Gb units, MP3 player and large portable HDD...

I've had two iPods with HDD. Never again. Flash only please. 16gb is more than enough for me. 8gb of music, 4gb of photos and 4gb of storage. Perfect.

[navier_stokes]

cyberface said:

navier_stokes said:

The ipod touch looks simply awesome... but why only 16GB! I was ready to order one but you can't have something that size with only 16GB... Surely thats going backwards... I mean my 3rd gen ipod that I'm looking to replace has 10Gb and that came out donkeys years ago. Think i'll be sticking with an ipod classic when I upgrade soon...

Flash storage vs. hard disks.

blah

I completely understand the flash vs HD story but to me 16GB is still completely unaccetable for a new generation ipod.

I have to say I've done, running, cycling and other acticities with my HD ipod and I've NEVER had it skip, so for me this isn't an issue. Thing is, I like my entire music collection in one place - you can't upload more music onto your ipod if you haven't got your laptop with you... i.e you're going away for more than just the day. And if you are going away for more than just the day with your laptop.. well you've got your laptop with you.

The shuffle, which I also have is much more suited to swapping music everyday and it takes up no space at all.

Don't get me wrong, the new touch is an awesome piece of kit, I would buy one in an instant if it had say 30GB+. I don't think thats too much to ask and I'm 99% sure thats the kind of capacity we'll be seeing in the touch within at the very most 2 years, more than likely within the year going by the rate the new touch's will sell.

[cyberface]

navier_stokes said:

cyberface said:

navier_stokes said:

The ipod touch looks simply awesome... but why only 16GB! I was ready to order one but you can't have something that size with only 16GB... Surely thats going backwards... I mean my 3rd gen ipod that I'm looking to replace has 10Gb and that came out donkeys years ago. Think i'll be sticking with an ipod classic when I upgrade soon...

Flash storage vs. hard disks.

blah

I completely understand the flash vs HD story but to me 16GB is still completely unaccetable for a new generation ipod.

I have to say I've done, running, cycling and other acticities with my HD ipod and I've NEVER had it skip, so for me this isn't an issue. Thing is, I like my entire music collection in one place - you can't upload more music onto your ipod if you haven't got your laptop with you... i.e you're going away for more than just the day. And if you are going away for more than just the day with your laptop.. well you've got your laptop with you.

The shuffle, which I also have is much more suited to swapping music everyday and it takes up no space at all.

Don't get me wrong, the new touch is an awesome piece of kit, I would buy one in an instant if it had say 30GB+. I don't think thats too much to ask and I'm 99% sure thats the kind of capacity we'll be seeing in the touch within at the very most 2 years, more than likely within the year going by the rate the new touch's will sell.

Fair enough - if you need your entire collection with you then only HD based devices will currently do for most people with decent music libraries. Especially as many people are now using higher bitrate encoding or lossless, which uses more space.

The Touch is as thin as a hard disk itself, and given that HD based devices need larger batteries to run the mechanical drive, you're not going to get a HD Touch without making it thicker.

FWIW I have the feeling that the Touch is more of an Apple feelers-out foray into the PDA market... it's an OS X PDA in all but name, I simply don't believe that Apple intend that main screen to forever contain 6 icons when there's space for 16 They already have all bases covered for iPods - from tiny clip-on cheap thingies, to small flash-based Nanos, all the way to obscene 160 GB capacity HD pods.

Up till now, the iPod has always been a 'consumer electronics' device with no customisation or SDK, it's just a damn good, easy-to-use, intuitive music player. The Touch is more like the iPhone, which runs a full OS X system... Apple have always said they're not going back to the Newton and making PDAs again, but the Touch has wifi and a web browser... I'm thinking that it's not really intended to be a traditional iPod at all and they're just testing the waters.

[chris.mapey]

Just a query - do you reckon that cover flow will be available as an update for my 80GB iPod video?

Love the idea of it, but as I've only had my iPod since Christmas last year it's not really ready to upgrade yet

Chris

[Noger]

"The Touch is more like the iPhone, which runs a full OS X system... "

Can't wait to get Bootcamp loaded up and run Vista on it !

OK, so serious question. People say that the iPhone runs a full OS X, and I have no reason to doubt that. So what exactly prevents you from running anything that will run on your Mac on an iPhone ? Or will it just run really slowly ?

[PJR]

The annoying thing about that new iPod nano, is that its at the "What the hell, i'll buy one anyway" price point. Then it would no doubt sit next to my other 2 iPods on the shelf, not doing a whole lot

I think all the new iPods are pretty neat. And there is certainly enough variations of them to keep just about anyone happy. Apple did good, in my opinion. But i'll resist buying for now, as what I have already works perfectly well for now.

P,

[cyberface]

Noger said:

"The Touch is more like the iPhone, which runs a full OS X system... "

Can't wait to get Bootcamp loaded up and run Vista on it !

OK, so serious question. People say that the iPhone runs a full OS X, and I have no reason to doubt that. So what exactly prevents you from running anything that will run on your Mac on an iPhone ? Or will it just run really slowly ?

OK so I was somewhat exaggerating. The iPhone runs a slimmed-down OS X kernel. There are some features that are missing, such as kexts and kernel trace debug facilities, and some performance counters are missing. It doesn't come as standard with the entire BSD userland but you can install it all, and run SSH onto the iPhone - most if not all command-line source has been built for the iPhone using the Dev Team's unofficial toolchain.

In terms of component frameworks, the iPhone has many of the standard OS X Cocoa frameworks but is missing some of the more complex ones, and includes iPhone-specific frameworks such as UIKit which have some features that are rumoured to be in Leopard.

As to running Boot Camp, obviously you know that this has nothing to do with whether the device runs a full OS X system, but everything to do with whether it's an x86 architecture machine The iPhone uses ARM and the unofficial toolchain is effectively an OS X gcc ARM cross-compiler (using LLVM) - this clearly is a top result from Apple deciding to make OS X cross-platform as possible from early days, it's running on G3, G4, G5, x86 32-bit, x86 64-bit, and ARM so far...

Regarding cross-compiling *anything* from the Mac to the iPhone, it will depend purely on whether the app is pure Objective-C / Cocoa and whether the frameworks used are present on the iPhone. Carbon apps are not supported (the frameworks aren't there) and neither are any 'emulated' codebases from the PPC era (which is handled by Rosetta on current x86 Mac machines). There is no official SDK so the hackers / developers are really feeling their way through the new iPhone-specific frameworks, using class_dump to work out what methods are available - but all the OSS command-line stuff was ported within hours of the unofficial toolchain being published.

Apache, Python, Ruby, the standard BSD userland set of utilities, etc. all cross-compiled and available. I'm guessing that the iPod Touch uses the same OS and utility set, minus the phone hardware drivers and software (CommCenter / CoreTelephony) since Apple make it clear that the 8 GB iPod Touch has lower 'song' capacity than the 8 GB iPod Nano.

It's not going to be viable as a render node or run Adobe CS3 any time soon, but it's as close to a full unix install as I've seen on PDA-class hardware, and I've pissed around with a few. For example, I'm currently logged into my iPhone over Wifi using SSH and running 'top' from my G5 Quad in a terminal window, whilst the iPhone is running Safari and displaying Pistonheads. I could try to overload it by running Apache on the iPhone at the same time and serve up web pages for some other machine on my network, but I'm reasonably confident that the iPhone is running the OS I'm familiar with

[BigMansZetec]

Think I am going to have to get one.

Was a bit concerned about the lack of space, but I don't know why, as I only have 6GB of music anyway!

A 16GB touch could soon be ordered.........now where is this terms student loan?

[Olf]

cyberface said:

Noger said:

"The Touch is more like the iPhone, which runs a full OS X system... "

Can't wait to get Bootcamp loaded up and run Vista on it !

OK, so serious question. People say that the iPhone runs a full OS X, and I have no reason to doubt that. So what exactly prevents you from running anything that will run on your Mac on an iPhone ? Or will it just run really slowly ?

OK so I was somewhat exaggerating. The iPhone runs a slimmed-down OS X kernel. There are some features that are missing, such as kexts and kernel trace debug facilities, and some performance counters are missing. It doesn't come as standard with the entire BSD userland but you can install it all, and run SSH onto the iPhone - most if not all command-line source has been built for the iPhone using the Dev Team's unofficial toolchain.

In terms of component frameworks, the iPhone has many of the standard OS X Cocoa frameworks but is missing some of the more complex ones, and includes iPhone-specific frameworks such as UIKit which have some features that are rumoured to be in Leopard.

As to running Boot Camp, obviously you know that this has nothing to do with whether the device runs a full OS X system, but everything to do with whether it's an x86 architecture machine The iPhone uses ARM and the unofficial toolchain is effectively an OS X gcc ARM cross-compiler (using LLVM) - this clearly is a top result from Apple deciding to make OS X cross-platform as possible from early days, it's running on G3, G4, G5, x86 32-bit, x86 64-bit, and ARM so far...

Regarding cross-compiling *anything* from the Mac to the iPhone, it will depend purely on whether the app is pure Objective-C / Cocoa and whether the frameworks used are present on the iPhone. Carbon apps are not supported (the frameworks aren't there) and neither are any 'emulated' codebases from the PPC era (which is handled by Rosetta on current x86 Mac machines). There is no official SDK so the hackers / developers are really feeling their way through the new iPhone-specific frameworks, using class_dump to work out what methods are available - but all the OSS command-line stuff was ported within hours of the unofficial toolchain being published.

Apache, Python, Ruby, the standard BSD userland set of utilities, etc. all cross-compiled and available. I'm guessing that the iPod Touch uses the same OS and utility set, minus the phone hardware drivers and software (CommCenter / CoreTelephony) since Apple make it clear that the 8 GB iPod Touch has lower 'song' capacity than the 8 GB iPod Nano.

It's not going to be viable as a render node or run Adobe CS3 any time soon, but it's as close to a full unix install as I've seen on PDA-class hardware, and I've pissed around with a few. For example, I'm currently logged into my iPhone over Wifi using SSH and running 'top' from my G5 Quad in a terminal window, whilst the iPhone is running Safari and displaying Pistonheads. I could try to overload it by running Apache on the iPhone at the same time and serve up web pages for some other machine on my network, but I'm reasonably confident that the iPhone is running the OS I'm familiar with

Is that a no or a yes? I can't quite make it out!

Only joking, seriously good explanantion of stuff CF. Sounds like you spend a lot of time delving deep.

[VEX]

Does anyone know if the iPod Touch is bluetooth enabled, I could do with updating my old iPaq which I only use for Tomtom, basic email and web browsing.

If it does (can see it in the spec's) then I am keen to get one.

[Olf]

VEX said:

Does anyone know if the iPod Touch is bluetooth enabled, I could do with updating my old iPaq which I only use for Tomtom, basic email and web browsing.

If it does (can see it in the spec's) then I am keen to get one.

no it's not.

[cyberface]

Olf said:

VEX said:

Does anyone know if the iPod Touch is bluetooth enabled, I could do with updating my old iPaq which I only use for Tomtom, basic email and web browsing.

If it does (can see it in the spec's) then I am keen to get one.

no it's not.

Interesting situation this. The iPod Touch *does* appear to have a bluetooth chip inside the unit. There have been photos on Apple sites (both german and UK) that show a bluetooth icon in the top right as per the iPhones:



These have now been taken down...

Also the FCC application for the iPod Touch only lists Wifi, so if they wanted to sell one with BT enabled then they'd have to go through the certification process again.

However if there's a bluetooth chip in the unit, then I'm sure it won't be long before some hacker gets it activated!!!

So your answer is *no* for casual users, but there's a real chance that it will be enabled by hackers at some point. Until we get a definitive tear-down from iFixit or someone, we won't know whether the rumour about the BT chip is true or not though.

[NDA]

When and where are these new ipods going to be available I wonder? I placed an order with Amazon with a despatch date of today and have just received an email saying it's now due end of September.

Are they available now - or are Amazon going to be one of the first to have them?

Thanks.......

[Olf]

NDA said:

When and where are these new ipods going to be available I wonder? I placed an order with Amazon with a despatch date of today and have just received an email saying it's now due end of September.

Are they available now - or are Amazon going to be one of the first to have them?

Thanks.......

At the launch it was announced they would not be available until end Sept.

[kiwisr]

NDA said:

When and where are these new ipods going to be available I wonder? I placed an order with Amazon with a despatch date of today and have just received an email saying it's now due end of September.

Are they available now - or are Amazon going to be one of the first to have them?

Thanks.......

In my experience the first to have them is always the Apple Stores, usually the quickest was to get one is walk into one of them on the day of release. Then they seem to trickle elsewhere.

[NDA]

Thanks for the feedback/info....

I had got rather excited thinking I was going to have it tomorrow or today. Spent a few hours last night tidying up my itunes back up.


D'oh!

[R1 GTR]

I was going to get a 30GB video to replace my old 4GB mini, but since the 80GB classic is now around that price (and available in silver) might have to go for that. 160GB is just absurd for a portable music player!

[BigMansZetec]

NDA said:

When and where are these new ipods going to be available I wonder? I placed an order with Amazon with a despatch date of today and have just received an email saying it's now due end of September.

Are they available now - or are Amazon going to be one of the first to have them?

Thanks.......

Last time I checked (yesterday), Amazon were quoting the 24th and Apple (online) were saying the 28th!