A Slew Of Newness

Well it has been quite a while...aka several days since this blog has seen a relatively odd post fly by. But in its lack a lot of news has come about and I am about to throw it all on to your laps. If you have been around this blogs blocks for long you know that I have fallen quite in love with the new round of netbooks. Especially that of the HP Mini 1000 which is definitely one of the best ones (and will be through the winter giving festivities) on the market today. What with itss 10.2 inch screen, its 92% real sized keyboard and now its offering of 3g like speeds. Apparently and also secretly, HP released a little refresh of the netbook with a 3g sim slot near the diminuative battery. Hint, hint all this is definitely on my wish list for the christmas season so if any of you were thinking....yep. Now that was easy wasn't it.

Also in the news this Monday is the Bailout of the Citigroup. This means that all the people out there that might have bought a couple of faltering shares last week now look to make a fairly handsome profit. Props to you all, just let me stop beating my head off from my desk in order to make you your celabratory cake.

And for a coup de gras, it looks like several sites out there are hinting that the iTunes croud might be going completely DRM free. Sony, Universal and Warner seem to be allowing the music giant to sell their music without all the suthorization issues. This would pull a lot of smart people away from the Amazon music store (which has always been DRM free) and back to iTunes. It would be great to be able to hear some music on last.fm on your iPhone and pop over to iTunes and buy tracks and albums you hear and love with no restrictions. After all, have we not been doing that with CD's for years? Alright all, my Monday update is FIN and I am back off to work. Before you leave though a question: do you know what DRM is? If so do you just live with it or do you break it? Comment up ya lurkers, ciao!

A New Breed?

As none of us know because you should be working hard enough to not have time to surf the web during the work week. Or for the folks who actually get paid to do this, take it from me; it is not as glorious as it sounds....well actually it is. Wait, where was I going with this?? Oh yeah! Itunes 8 was released today along with a slew of new ipod nanos and a slick new ipod touch.

Starting with Itunes 8, the big thing is Genius, which compares your music and attempts to make intelligent guesses on other groups you might like. This is basically the same service that Pandora and Last.fm use. In addition, they have introduced grid view which media player 11 had way back in 2005. Beyond all of this, I think Itunes is much faster, it syncs with my Iphone much quicker and easier and seems hands down a much more native app on the Macbook Pro.

Because I own an Iphone I could care less about the Ipod touch but the new 16gig colorful nanos do look very cool. They have a very curvy design and a Zune like accelerometer that allows you to control certain parts of it via shaking the nano or putting it sideways into landscape view (Zune only does landscape). They look very cool and the Nanos seem to be they direction Stevie is going these days. Unfortunatly, I still would rather have the big Classic, but with almost no update to the current Classic today, it looks like this could be the last iteration of the big ipod. Sniff...16gigs is 50 bones cheaper and very small....more then 16gigs needed with genius and smart playlists? What do you all think?