It was certainly an interesting Keynote Presentation by Steve Jobs yesterday. No announcements of anything new on the PC or OS side but two new products that are widening Apple’s marketplace. I guess that makes sense if you considered that now “officially” Apple, Inc. is no longer “Apple Computer, Inc.”

First there was the product that was previewed late last year, Apple TV, which connects to you TV and allows wireless interface to media on PC’s and iTunes. It’s a great concept and the price of $299 is not too bad, but I do have some reservation about some of the tech. specs of the device. For one it has a top resolutions of 720p which is fairly low for todays HDTV’s. Then there is also the question of having only a 40gb internal hard drive. I guess we’ll have to wait and see once the device starts shipping in February 07.

The big announcement, which took up most of the Keynote Presentation, was the iPhone. It’s a beauty. It runs a version of OS X and has a super sharp large touch screen. It’s not only a phone but has all of the standard “smart phone”/PDA applications such as calendar, email, internet browser (Safari) as well as other widgets. It also has Wifi and Bluetooth and is a fully functional iPod with 4 or 8 gb of memory. The demo was awesome but again we’ll have to wait and see how well it works in June 07. Phone Service is only available with Cingular.

It appears that Lev Grossman, from Time, had a preview of the new iPhone and writes about the experience here.

Update: 01/10/2007, 02:30 pm - As I have been reading some of the “day after” reviews of Apple’s Keynote product announcements I see that many people have similar concerns as I do over the technical specs of the Apple TV product such as a USB2.0 port that doesn’t seem to be able to be used for external storage and not being able to download directly from itunes to the device. Both of those would be very strange restrictions.

While I love the design and simple beauty of it, I have reservation, as many others do, of the iPhone specifications.¬† Will the system be open…i.e. will you be able to upload and develop programs for the version of OS X it’s running?¬† Battery life will also be a big questions.¬† Push email is great…but only Yahoo?¬† There’s some other issues as well.

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