In the UK, the iTunes music store was closed all day yesterday for refurbishment, with a black screen just saying ‘Showtime.’ At about 6pm (UK time) Steve Jobs announced why. There’s a slew of new/updated iPods and more content on the store as well as version 7 of iTunes for Mac and Windows (more on this later).
iPods get another makeover
All the iPods are being updated, from the video iPod down to the shuffle.
The video iPod now comes in two versions, 30GB and 80GB (£189 inc VAT and £259 respectively). They have a new screen that’s 60% brighter and more vibrant. As well as playing videos and music, viewing photos and the normal iPod features, games can be downloaded from the iTunes store (£3.99) and played on all 5th generation+ iPods. The battery life has been increased and with the 30GB iPod lasting 14 hours and the 80GB 20 hours (for music, that drops to 6.5 hours for video, but long enough for a couple of films).
Movies (and video from the iTunes store) are now stored in 640 x 480 format.
The new Nanos come in 2, 4 and 8GB (£99, £129 and £169). Apple has gone all retro and reverted back to the mini design in that they now have an aluminum case in a variety of colours (sliver, pink, blue, green and black). It’s thinner than the 1st generation Nano. They now have 24 hours battery life.
Both the Nano and iPod video now have search features so that albums can be searched for etc., using the click wheel (with on-screen letters and search criteria). Gapless playback is a new feature, so songs can be played continuously without the normal two second wait between songs. There’s no beat matching yet, but maybe that’s Apple’s next enhancement so DJ’s will be out of a job.
The new shuffle (1GB, £55) is tiny and again in retro silver aluminum. It’s about 1 inch long (and almost square) and has a built-in clip (well the back is a clip).
Hyundai Telematic Korea have announced their way-posh Roadbank HTMS 18800 DMB navigator, an ultra slim, in-car navigation system with a hefty 7 inch touch screen. 
As well as offering navigation tools, the Roadbank comes stuffed with multimedia widgets, doubling up as a high end media console with support for movie playback formats like WMV9, MPEG-1/2/4, DivX, Xvi and H.264. It can also display digital photos too. 
The Roadbank HTMS 18800 DMB runs on Windows CE 5.0 and comes with 64 MB of Nand Flash with a SD card slot providing memory expansion options. 
Fujifilm have announced the FinePix A700 compact digital camera, a shiny new addition to their entry-level ‘A’ series camera range. 
Unlike Fujifilm’s more upmarket offerings, their famous high ISO settings are nowhere to be found on the A700, which can only offer a comparatively restricted 100 to 400 ISO sensitivity with no anti-shake. 
Fujifilm FinePix A700 specifications
iTunes 7 is now available for download. The indexing has been improved, as has navigation by re-organising the Library and other indexes that normally appear on the left hand side. If iTunes is linked to an account on the iTunes store, it can now download artwork for any music on your system. Searching is also easier, as both music and video can be searched by viewing the artwork and then seeing what’s available in say that album. 
All movie and video content is now stored in 640 x 480 format. 
Sony has announced two new cameras shunting off their ever-busy production line, the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T50 and DSC-N2, both offering large LCD screens. 
Shipping in (ahem) ‘bold’ red, black and silver, the DSC-T50 offers 56 MB of internal memory (with Memory Stick Duo/ PRO Duo memory cards allowing storage expansion up to 4GB) and sizes up at just 95×56.5×23.4 and 170g. 
Sony DSC-N2
“With digital photography, the social interaction that happens when people share their pictures has become as important as making great photographs,” insisted Phil Lubell, director of marketing for digital still cameras and photo printers at Sony Electronics. 
Although I know that shouting at computer components is unlikely to make them magically fix themselves, it somehow makes me feel a bit better. 
Cursed with a jazz approach to functionality, it’s a moody number with a teenager’s approach to getting up. 
Naturally, the ‘clean heads’ option has little effect (apart from draining £££ inks at an accelerated rate) but just when I’m about to give up on the thing completely – whoosh! out comes a perfect print, with deep blacks and vibrant colours. 
It knows when things are urgent
The exchange of Apple’s might-catch-fire batteries is happening faster than originally anticipated. 
Fresh out of Japan is the new Caplio R5 digital camera, featuring anti-shake, a new 7.24 megapixel CCD and the same mighty 7.1x optical wide zoom lens (28-200mm, 35mm equiv) as seen on its predecessor, the Caplio R4 (
We can’t say we liked this move, as the smaller, recessed power button is much harder to operate (we also had issues with powering up the camera, but we’ll move on to that later). 
LCD screen
Seeing as the assistant was most unimpressed with our antics we had to cut short our testing, so we can only assume that the differences would manifest themselves under more demanding light conditions or under closer scrutiny. 
The LCD screen was easy to read (although, being London in September, the sun wasn’t exactly blinding), but we would have liked to have seen an optical viewfinder in there too. 
Night time woes
Noisy nights
Street photographers looking to grab late night sneaky shots with the camera on 10 second self timer will have to think again too as the flash – yes the FLASH! – blinks brightly on and off during the countdown! 
We had some problems with that the SD slot, with a worrying ‘card format’ error popping up unexpectedly halfway through a shoot. 
Spot
There are a couple of dilemmas for anyone who takes their MP3 player to play in the car. How do you get the sound to the car stereo and how do you stop the thing sliding about all over the place? The TrekStor MP3-RadioStation f.ox tackles these. 
Where do the tunes come from? There’s no storage on board, as the music is supplied via a USB memory stick that plugs in the bottom. This arrangement brings the advantage of low cost expansion and that the music storage is only limited by the size and number of memory sticks you’ve got. 
Sadly for UK users, devices like this can’t be used legally, as Ofcom don’t differentiate between low-power gadgets such as this that transmit over a short distance and a full blown radio station. 
We can’t say we like the thought of being bombarded by different whiffs while we’re listening to the radio, but it seems someone in Japan liked the idea so much that they’re about to launch a fragrance-pumpin’ product in October. 
The gadget connects to your desktop via USB, with the PC downloading the aroma instructions from the radio station via the Internet, with odorous wafts synchronised to match whatever song is currently being played. 
The USB Aroma Geur is available for 49,900 Yen ($430), with the service scheduled to start up in Japan from 2nd October 2006.