1. Tiered pricing. If a song is new and/or popular, Apple pushes the price up to $1.29 for the single.Old songs are 69 cents. The remaining lot are 99 cents still. Seems like albums are still $9.99.
2. Not all songs are DRM-free yet. I just purchased a song from iTunes a few days ago, after Apple’s announcement of their going DRM-free. The song wasn’t available elsewhere online, at least not from the DRM-free stores I frequent (AmazonMP3 and Lala). It was 99 cents, 128 kbps and laced with FairPlay DRM. Wonderful, just wonderful.
3. Got DRMed songs in your library? Double the bitrate and unlock the DRM, all for only 30 cents per song. What, you say? nearly one-third the price I paid for the song itself? Yep, welcome to Apple.

YouTube is now serving up TV shows on their site, starting with Star Trek, Beverly Hills 90210 and MacGyver. The interface seems reminiscent of Hulu’s, with a big focus on the viewing area, plus some ads interspersed in with the content. Fine with me…I’d rather watch an ad or two on a cool TV show than have YouTube keep on not making any money…

Texting while driving has now been proven to be more dangeous than driving while drunk. Just don’t do it. Also, if you don’t have a number on voice dial, think twice before trying to hammer it own while speeding down the freeway. Have an iPhone? You’re screwed; stop if you want to do anything with your shiny new toy, or have someone who isn’t behind the wheel do it for you.

Know about the Roku “Netflix Box”? Pretty soon it’ll be able to stream from a variety of sources. A very good deal when you’re talking about a device that costs just under $100.

Between this article and the last one of its kind, MySpace Music was announced…and streamed over one billion songs! It helps that “the usual suspects” are on board in terms of recording labels. It’s also an advantage when your service is probably already the largest aggregator of indie bands on the web at the moment.

Aside from being delayed…or maybe coming soon…depending on who you ask, Windows 7 (which, by the way, will actually be called Windows 7 upon release) will not ship with photo, video or e-mail editing applications on board. This time around, they’ll be downloadable from Windows Live, something Microsoft is already doing as an option with everything mentioned but a video editor. The idea is to get both applicatioons and Windows itself to the market quicker, with the side benefit of less litigation from the suit-happy EU. In “same difference” news, Microsoft is now touting “Windows Cloud“, some bit of vaporware that exemplifies Microsoft’s new focus on web-based services. Misplaced focus? You decide.

eBay is nixing check and money order payment options for small-ticket items, trying to keep buyer satisfaction up. They also laid off 1,000 workers recently. Coincidence? Mostly, but eBay hasn’t been doing so well lately, with their modified policies on both ends of the transaction and the site’s unfortunate abundance of cheap accessories for whatever item you’re really trying to buy.

Verizon Wireless now has the option to buy a phone and plan without a contract, though you’ll pay as much as three hundred more dollars for your phone for this privilege. Or you can activate your own Verizon-capable phone. In other news, they’ve announced that the BlackBerry Storm 9500, a touch-screen, multi-network Swiss army knife of a phone, will be out “in time for the holidays” “priced competitively”. Whatever that means, the phone itself looks awesome. Not so awesome: charging content providers three cents per text message sent to a Verizon subscriber, in addition to what that subscriber already pays to receive the message. Look for mobile services like Google SMS to start offering their wares everywhere except Verizon sometime soon.

The Large Hadron Collider is shut down until early spring. Even the paranoid are safe…for now…

TiVo is now available for your computer. TiVo lovers rejoice…and say “Finally” under their breaths.

Pandora will survive for just a little longer. The internet radio service is a direct beneficiary from a Senate bill that passed recently, allowing internet broadcasters more time in negotiating with the big names in terrestrial radio, who would absolutely love to sock it to internet venues with high per-play royalties, thus putting the poor guys out of business.

RealDVD has been halted from sale by entertainment industry litigation, after Real, the software’s producer, sued to establish legitimacy of its product. In the mean time, Google is your friend; there are plenty of free DVD rippers out there.

iTunes threatened to shut its music section down in light of Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) rate hikes. The CRB blinked, so Amazon’s MP3 store is still playing second fiddle to the Apple music behemoth.

Adobe Flash is being developed for the iPhone. The problem is that Apple decides what goes onto the iPhone, and such platforms as Flash just aren’t on that list. A few other notable apps, such as a podcast catcher and a special GMail reader, have also been rejected. Look for them on an Android phone near you soon.

Android phones seem to be qite the hot item these days. T-Mobile is having trouble keeping up with preorders for their device, the HTC-built G1. Over 1.5 million have been sold, and it isn’t even the first day!

It’s not a phone, but the Nintendo DSi, coming soon to Japan and likely later here, looks to be a solid answer to Apple’s iPhone\iPod Touch challenge to the mobile gaming throne. The DSi has an internal camera, a 3.2 megapixel external camera, larger screens and an application store. It’s also even thinner than the last iteration of Nintendo’s handheld series, making it enough of an upgrade to get people thinking about the platform again. On the other hand, it remains to be seen whether DS or DS Lite owners will upgrade…the price of $190 probably doesn’t justify the number of features added to the unit.

Heard of the Slingbox? Its makers will soon be pulling together content from major studios, your computer and even the Slingbox itself at Sling.com, though not all of these features will e available at launch. Still, very, very nice.

It’s a TV, it’s a camera, it’s a game console, it’s an MP3 player…it’s the Sega Vision! No kidding…they’re getting back into the hardware market next year, though who knows how successful this handheld PSP competitor will fare.

Want more battery life? Then don’t boot into Windows and use a cell phone processor to do all your work. That’s the premise behind the Dell Latitude ON feature. Naturally, when you’re in this flash-based, email-checking mode you’re running Linux and not Windows Vista.

Heard of the Sony eReader? No? What if Sony gave it a touch screen, spiffed up the design and added a few features both on the dive and its associated online store, then raised the price by $100? Ah well, that’s what those folks did…

Is drunk e-mailing a problem for you? How about drunk basic math? If you answered yes to the last two questions, Google’s Mail Goggles may be the answer to your first problem, by taking advantage of the second.

AMD is splitting into two companies, one for design and the other for actual chip-building. The idea is to have the design half focus on…well…competing with Intel on the CPU front and Intel\nVidia in the GPU sector, leaving the expensive process of building factories and other such physical burdens to another entity.

What happens when you cross light with WiFi? A research project, of course. The idea is to allow for scrue short-range communication in lieu of WiFi by way of LED-based light fixtures. Sorry guys, but the very thought gives me subliminal messages that a headache is imminent.

Google Chrome (yes, the browser) seems to have had a dose of meteoric success; its market share is dropping faster than the Dow in an economic crisis (close to home but an appropriate sense of scale). It probably doesn’t help that the browser is no longer being promoted on Google’s front page, but it’ll probably go back there once a new version (or a Mac version, or both) becomes available.

Paranoids, now is your time. The Google-exclusive GeoEye-1 mapping satellite has beamed its first high-resolution images down to earth, and while they aren’t military-grade (each pixel covers 50cm of territory) they are creepily detailed, especially if you don’t trust what used to be simply the world’s best search engine, or something like that.

That’s it for now. More news bits coming soon!

iTunes 8 – Apple has once again reworked the UI of iTunes to focus on album art and other cool visual cues. Accessibility is increased, too. The biggest feature, however, is the introduction of the “Genius” sidebar, which suggests songs that you might like based on the song you’re listening to, the other songs in your library, and anonymous data gathered from everyone else using the Genius feature. It’s sort of like Pandora Radio or Last.fm, except you have to buy the songs you want to listen to, and thenceforth can listen to them any time you want.

iTunes Store – iTunes 8 also now supports HD iTunes video, namely TV shows, now available for $2.99 apiece. Also, NBC is back, so if you want to watch The Office, you can get it from Apple, now in glorious high resolution, albeit for a 50% premium.

iPod classic – Apple discontinued the thicker Classic and upgraded the $249 thin version to 120GB of storage. The Genius feature may also be included, but no reference to it in the sources I followed.

iPod nano – So the “iPod fatty” didn’t go off too well on its design. How about the “iPod oval”? Apple flipped the last-gen iPod nano’s screen on its side, bringing back the original iPod nano formfactor. Except this time the music player has a glass sheen covering the screen and a curved front and back, for an oval profile that’s even thinner than before. Color options are many and striking.

Feature-wise, the new nano has an accelerometer so it will reorient photos, put music selection into CoverFlow mode, or play video on glorious widescreen when the device is turned on its side, just like the iPhone. One other, very fun thing: shake the iPod and it shuffles! The nano also has the Genius feature introduced in iTunes.

Pricing for the nano, which gets 24 hours of music playback and 4 hours of video…and is the most environmentally-friendly iPod yet…is $149 for 8GB of music storage or $199 for 16GB.

Headphones – The new iPod nano can do voice recording…if there’s a mic to use with it. Apple to the rescue: $29 buys standard earbuds with built-in playback controls and a microphone, $50 more gets you high-end, dual-driver in-ear units.

iPod touch – Thinner by way of the same beveled edges that set the new iPhone apart from the old, the iPod touch also incorporates a volume rocker on its left side…to control a built-in speaker! Both these features were in the iPhone when it came out, but not in the touch, until now. Also, the new “iTouch” integrates with Nike’s Nike+iPod system (you just need the shoe transmitter now, as opposed to both a transmitter and a receiver). Of course, the Genius feature is included.

The iPod touch now gets access, in a whopping sixty-two countries, to games like Spore “Origins”, GameLoft’s Real Soccer 2009 and the upcoming Need For Speed game, via the iTunes App Store. All these games (over 700 of them) pleace the iPod touch as a direct, albeit more expensive, competitor to Sony’s PSP and Nintendo’s DS handheld consoles. In case you’re wondering, it looks as though the iPod touch\iPhone beat the other two platforms out in terms of graphics quality.

The touch will be available in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB varieties for $229, $299 and $399, respectively.

iPhone\iTouch software – The new iPods come with version 2.1 of Apple’s mobile operating system. This update, which fixes numerous bugs (including one where iPhones take forever to sync), will be available to everyone Friday. iPod touch users who already have the latest software version (the one that includes the App Store) get the update for free, everyone else has to pay $9.99.

In conclusion, Apple’s event was expected but great nonetheless. They continue to innovate and lower the prices of their products to stay ahead of everyone else in the field (iPods make up about three-quarters of the digital music player market) and that’s a good thing. It’s annoying that they haven’t released a laptop update since the minor speedbump in the spring (between then and now Intel has introduced a vastly upgraded line of processors) but, for the purpose of “Rock On”, the September 9th event does an admirable job.