William Computer Blog

Apple released iPod nano

The rumors that caused Apple’s stock went up more than 5% yesterday reaching 52-week high were true. Apple just announced the replacement of iPod mini with a new, smaller and sleeker design called iPod nano. So, it’s good bye iPod Mini and Hello iPod nano.

The iPod nano comes in 2GB and 4GB and it comes in black and white. Both iPod have color screen so just like the iPod you could store your photos in it. It has a very similar design to iPod except the nano is very thin just like a pencil. Read more about iPod nano.

Beside iPod nano, Apple also announced the world’s first mobile phone with iTunes. iTunes is available inside Motorola ROKR E1 mobile phone so you could listen to your music everywhere. More info about it.

The announcement is not finished yet, Apple also released iTunes 5 with long requested features such as streamlined design, smart shuffle, search bar, ability to organize playlist into folders, Windows users can sync with outlook and Outlook express, album reviews.

The iTunes 5 update is not available via Software update at the time I heard about the announcement. So I decided to go to iTunes website and download the application.

iTunes 5 looks different because Apple got rid of the brushed metal theme and use a gradient theme you often see in Tiger. It reminds me to GUIdebook interview with John Gruber.

In that interview Gruber mentioned:

I’m guessing brushed metal will fall out of fashion next. I think it’s ridiculous that the UI look-and-feel from just four years ago is now considered passé.

and

You can see that the designers at Apple are getting tired of the candy-colored look and feel. A lot of their new stuff, the custom controls, doesn’t look like that at all. They’re using much flatter (in the 3D sense) controls, with gradients. E.g. the buttons at the bottom of the Podcasting section in iTunes 4.9.

I think the new iTunes 5 (screenshot) looks very sexy!

All that is not enough though, they also released an update to Quicktime version 7.0.2 but it’s only a minor update. I updated mine already.

• September 8, 2005