Apple on Wednesday unveiled a number of additions to its current offerings which included revamped range of IPods, new versions of iOS software, iTunes 10 with a new logo and improved features but the offerings which have elicited tremendous response from followers and critics are the introduction of re-designed version of Apple TV and Apple’s foray into social networking with Ping, a place to discover music and follow friends and artists.
New life into Apple IPods
Truly Spectacular! This is the phrase which comes to my mind after witnessing the latest roll out of IPods. The new IPod shuffle is much smaller and smarter than the previous one. It supports Genius mixes and has 15 hours playback. Its 2GB, costs $49, and comes in five different colors. The new IPod Nano is multi-touch. It is 46 percent smaller and 42 percent lighter than its predecessor with 24 hours playback.
IPod touch has also inherited some exciting features from IPhone. It’s even thinner, but more remarkable with Retina Display, featuring 4X pixels, 326 ppi, 24-bit color and LED. It has Apple A4 chip, 3-axis Gyro and a program called FaceTime with front camera. The touch has 40 hours of music playback time. It can edit videos and has a Game center.
Refurbished AppleTV
The re-formulated Apple TV is much smaller in size than its predecessor and costs around $99. It will allow users to rent TV shows for 99 cents or first-run movies for $4.99 each. Unlike other Apple devices, content on Apple TV cannot be purchased but only rented. It has no local storage and streams all of its content like music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, radio stations, photos from Internet, Mac, PC, iPhone or iPad. The device also has an inbuilt support for Netflix, YouTube, Flickr and Apple’s MobileMe.
Sure, this is another attempt from Apple to shift the TV viewing behavior, something which hasn’t changed for over 50 years now. And it is not alone in the race. There are number of players in the market who are trying hard to marry the web to Television. So the stage is all set for mass market adoption and it remains to be seen whether AppleTV can do the same to television what iPhone did to Phones three years ago.
Ping, the new Social Network !
Steve Jobs, Co-founder of Apple also used the opportunity to announce Apple’s expansion into Social-Networking through its Music-Centric social Network Ping. The idea is to provide the users with an option to discover new music in ITunes, which according to Steve contains more than 12 million songs. So the result is Ping which seems more like Facebook and twitter integrated into ITunes. Ping will be integrated into new iTunes 10 and can be accessed from iPhone and iPod Touch. It will enable the users to follow their favorite artists and friends. It will also feature a stream of activities and customized Top 10 lists based on music tastes of various users.
What’s in it for us?
While introducing Ping, Steve jobs mentioned that Apple is opening the service to 160 million existing ITunes users across 23 countries. Sadly, India does not appear in the list of those 23 which means that Ping is not available to ITunes users in India. (It took some time for me to figure this out not before I tried some tweaks like changing country in ITunes, but in vain). That’s a bit strange because Apple has described Ping as a Social-network for discovering music. One reason could be that Apple wants to link the new Ping with its ITunes Music store. Though ITunes store is available in India, it is yet to emerge as a popular destination for buying music. But If Apple has any serious aspirations to grow Ping into a global social networking powerhouse; it should strongly consider making it available to everyone.
Music is one of the few subjects which can arouse passion and conversation. So it makes perfect sense for a music service to be social, and Ping has just done that. But I feel that there is more to it. The success of Ping can give rise to new trend of niche social networks with fragmented groups sharing various enthusiasms. What do you think?
Can we say that Ping would be the final nail in the coffin for MySpace. Surely like the way Apple is exploring Social networking in a very niche area through Ping.