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The mighty Apple yesterday, at the first official live-streamed event, ever, well and truly rev’d their entire iPod range. The maestro of superlatives, Steve Jobs, sporting a re-designed turtle-neck (imagine the hallway convo…Jony Ive sees Steve, and opens with, “Dude. Your turtle-neck design. I’m not feeling it….” The rest is history…) was on top form, and little wonder. The new range looks superb, and features many of the long-awaited features that iPod aficionados have been screaming for.

iPod Shuffle: The new Shuffle returns to the square form factor of the pre-previous model, and thankfully loses the silly, instantly breakable ear-bud mounted controls, getting a real click-wheel in their place. Of course, there’s a handy clip for athletic wearability… The tiniest body is machined from a single piece of aluminium, and comes in silver, blue, green, orange, or pink. Other new features include playlists, the increasingly improving and popular Genius mixes, and a discrete Voiceover button. The capacity is 2GB and the device will last 15 hours on a single charge.

iPod nano: Apple’s obsession with touch, is slowly but relentlessly spreading down their line of products. The new iPod nano is the latest to be annointed with a display featuring Multi-touch technology. The device form-factor changes completely, from previous nano’s. And. Lo and behold, there’s a clip! That, together with the size change, makes this another easily-wearable iPod. There are 8GB and 16GB models, and the battery life is 24 hours. Display rotation makes for super-easy handling, and Nike+ love and the built-in pedometer, ensure this one’ll be loved by the jogging set.

iPod Touch: The biggest of the iPods has inherited a slew of features from it’s sibling, the iPhone, but at the same time, the locked-in-step same-case-design trend, has fallen away. The remarkable 960×480 pixel resolution Retina display, front and rear cameras for FaceTime, and HD (720p) video recording and editing? All in. iOS 4.1 brings with it Game Center, and the device loves it. BTW? The “Project Sword” demo by Mike Capps from Epic games at the Apple event yesterday, was a excellent peek at what to expect from gaming on the new Touch.

Google’s GMail is constantly adding features, mostly through the Labs incubator feature. Some make it, some don’t. Some are minor, but then there are some, that are game-changing. Google announced on Monday that a new feature called Priority Inbox would be rolled out to all users. It’s still in Beta, but the team at Mountain View seem pretty confident about it.

Priority Mail splits your inbox into three areas, for unread mail that you WANT to read, mail messages that you don’t care about, and read items that you don’t want to forget about. And it does it, smartly, learning from your usage, when you promote/demote messages manually, that aren’t grouped to your liking. This means that it’ll get better, the more you use it. And by better, Google means: “Like YOU want it.”

From the Gmail Blog:
“In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.”

This looks excellent. Can’t wait for it to roll out, over OUR GMail accounts….

Okay. Hands up. Does anyone think, that at a screen size of 9.7 inches, the Apple iPad is TOO big? Aparently, a lot of people do. Supporting that assertion, there have been nagging, persistent rumors of a second-generation iPad, with a 7-inch screen. The Taiwan-based, Chinese-language newspaper Economic Daily News reported last Tuesday that the new model will be 28% lighter, down to 500 grams, from 700, and will use an In-Plane Switching LCD display for wide viewing angles. Of course, these are the same folks who brought us the iPhone Nano rumour back in 2008, and we all know where that went.

But. Samsung appears to be taking the feedback to heart, and in a planned event on 2nd September, one day after Apple’s event, and a day before the IFA trade show in Berlin, Germany, will demonstrate it’s Galaxy Tab, a 7-inch tablet computer, powered by an in-house Samsung-developed processor, and fueled by Google’s Android 2.2 operating system.

We know that NetBook sales in Europe have taken a big drop, and it seems like Samsung is heading down the tablet PC trail to try to pick up the slack. Sources claim the company is expected to ship 100,000 tablet PCs per month initially.

If you’re an Xbox 360 fan, and you’re salivating at the prospect of controller-free games and Xbox LIVE entertainment, then you should mark the 10th of November in your calendar. Microsoft has announced that they will launch Kinect for Xbox 360, officially, in Europe, Middle East and Africa, on Wednesday, 10th November. Xbox LIVE and a BIG line up of games on Windows Phone 7, will also launch, and Microsoft announced a new line up of LIVE enabled titles coming to the PC.

Speaking before the show, Chris Lewis, vice president, Interactive Entertainment Business for Microsoft Europe said:
“We are bringing the Kinect experience to Europe for the first time at Gamescom 2010, because this is the biggest show in the region and we’re committed to investing in Europe and the critical role it plays in Xbox’s global success.”

We took a look at how the Kinect technology is put together in a previous post, as well as Sony’s Playstation Move, in a related post. The big thing that came out of that excitement, was that Nintendo has a HUGE lead and Microsoft and Sony are playing catch-up. We see Microsoft taking the approach of delivering a plethora of titles on launch day to give gamers a rich choice, as well as driving the Windows Phone 7 platform, with the first wave of Xbox LIVE games launching on Windows Phone 7, ready for the Xmas rush.

Fears that Apple’s recent IP licensing from Liquid Metal technology company, um, Liquidmetal Technologies, would immediately lead to Terminator Phones, might one day be realised, but for now, maybe we’ll have to settle for something a little less exciting. Like say, a SIM-tray ejection tool?

Seems that Apple wanted to test the light, strong, rigid material, but ran foul of their own stringent “two-supplier” rules, which protects their supply lines against a single supplier going down and crippling production. Problem is, no-one else makes this stuff. Oops. So it was decided to test on a non-essential part. The SIM-tray ejector pin. Imagine the co-inventor of the metal alloy, Atakan Peker’s surprise when he opened his iPhone 3G and found the ejector pin: “That’s my metal,” he said. “I recognized it immediately. Take it from an expert, that’s Liquidmetal.”

Guess we’ll just have to wait a little longer for the iPhone “Terminator” edition …