Apple today announced the new iPod touch, packed with incredible new features including Apple’s stunning Retina display, FaceTime video calling, HD video recording, Apple’s A4 chip, 3-axis gyro, iOS 4.1, and Game Center — all combined in the thinnest and lightest iPod touch ever. The new iPod touch features up to 40 hours of music playback and seven hours of video playback on a single battery charge.

The redesigned iPod shuffle features both clickable buttons and Apple’s innovative VoiceOver technology, enabling you to easily navigate your music and playlists without ever looking at your iPod shuffle. The wearable iPod shuffle has an all-aluminum enclosure with a built-in clip and comes in five brilliant colors — silver, blue, green, orange, and pink.

iTunes 10 features Ping, a new social network for music that lets you follow your favorite artists and friends to discover what music they’re talking about, listening to, and downloading. With Ping you can post your thoughts and opinions, your favorite albums and songs, and the music you’ve downloaded from iTunes — plus view concert listings and tell your friends which concerts you plan to attend.

Shares of Apple Inc. (AAPL) closed today at $269.00, putting the company’s market value at $244.77 billion.

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) currently has a market value of$219.10 billion. Dell Inc. (DELL) has a market value of$25.32 billion.

Add them both together and Apple is worth more than Microsoft and Dell combined, $244.77 billion vs. $242.42 billion, respectively.

Now, let that headline percolate around in your brain and roll it off your tongue a few times – it’s really quite satisfying.

Congrats, Apple, for a job well done! Congrats, Jobs, for an Apple done well!

Apple’s “surge over the past few years has resembled a space-shuttle launch — a series of rapid, tightly choreographed explosions that leave everyone dumbfounded and smiling. The whole thing has happened so quickly, and seemed so natural, that there has been little opportunity to understand what we have been witnessing,” Farhad Manjoo writes for Fast Company.

“The company, its leader, and its products have become cultural lingua franca,” Manjoo writes. “Dell wants to be the Apple for business; Zipcar the Apple for car sharing. Industries such as health care and clean energy search for their own Steve Jobs, while comedian Bill Maher says the government would be better run if the Apple CEO were head of state. (The Justice Department and FTC, which are both investigating Apple’s tactics, might disagree.)”
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“Gadget site Pocket-lint confirms with an unnamed source within Skype that the company would more than welcome an opportunity to make their already popular chatting software compatible with Apple’s new, open-standard, FaceTime video calling technology and theiPhone 4,” Joe Aimonetti reports for CNET.

“Pocket-lint’s source says,’We would welcome the opportunity to work with Apple to bring mobile video calling not only to our many millions of Skype users on iPhone around the world, but also to the countless more making video calls on desktops, TVs and other connected devices,’” Aimonetti reports.

“Clearly the ability to video call from Skype-enabled computers to iPhone 4 (and vice versa) would certainly be advantageous to all users involved,” Aimonetti reports. “This would also make the FaceTime functionality on iPhone 4, which is currently restricted to Wi-Fi, seem much more robust.”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

SteveJack writes over in our Opinion section:

Let’s review the events in Apple-land over the past few months, shall we?

1. An Apple engineer either leaves an iPhone 4 prototype, or has one lifted from him, in a beer garden

2. Said iPhone 4 prototype gets plastered all over the world, taking away a meaningful measure of excitement from Steve Jobs’ planned reveal

3. During Jobs’ big unveiling of the already-unveiled, the Wi-Fi is so saturated by bloggers’ WiFi networks that he can’t do his demos properly, if at all
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