From Away

This morning Apple revealed the iPod Photo; a new iteration of the iPod that is capable of storing pictures and displaying them in slideshows on the iPod screen as well as on a television screen when connected. The new iPod has a color screen, 15 hours of battery life when playing MP3’s and 5 hours when viewing photo slideshows. The iPod Photo has also been given a size jump; it is available in 40 and 60 GB models ($679 CDN and $799 CDN respectively).

When the time comes that I do have the money to spend on an iPod, I don’t think I’m going to go with the iPod photo, unless the price comes down. It just doesn’t seem sensible to me to spend that much extra money to carry my digital photos around, when I already have SmartMedia cards with enough capacity to carry as many pictures as I could ever want or need. One thing I do like about the iPod Photo is the fact that it can display album covers on screen. And like Michael, I’m also quite anal about adding album covers to tracks as soon as they’re imported into my 40GB+ music library.

Apple also opened up the iTunes’ Music Store to many customers in the European Union. I was kind of shocked to see that Canada was not on the list of new iTMS’s this morning, but Apple has stated that the Canadian iTMS will open in November. I’ve been anxiously awaiting this opening since Apple made iTMS available in the UK as well as France and Germany. I’m guessing one of the reasons for Apple holding off on Canada is because of the liberal stance that the Canadian judicial system has on music piracy.