Have you ever wanted to share everything with everyone? Maybe you’ve always wanted to project your home movies on your seatmate’s tray table. Or maybe you want to surprise the kids with some video of you back during your frat days. What better way to do it than with a $495 mini-projector for iPhones, iPods Touch, and Video iPods.

It blows out video at 640×480 pixels at 60 inches and it includes speakers and a tripod. The video, above, proves the majesty of its resolution and the usefulness of its usefulcality.

via Eng

Do you think this Spanish designer knows that Apple is a couple of generations past the original iPod shuffle? I had and returned that iPod shuffle model years ago. (for a Harmony remote, btw) No matter, the case is still kind of novel, if not somewhat impractical.

I think the skin is kind of cute. Who knows if it will ever make it to production since that iPod is so old it’s somewhat rare even on eBay. But more power to Rodrigo Canedo of Canedo Studios. He doesn’t care if no one will ever buy his creation. Good design never expires – or some shit like that.

You set up the dock unit wherever you like, and attach a small transmitter to your iPhone or iPod, and voila! You’re connected to those speakers like it’s nobody’s business! The big selling point behind yAired is that it uses Linear PCM encoding. So unlike Bluetooth, it doesn’t compress the audio stream before flying it through the air. So you get to hear your compressed MP3s uncompressed. Yay.

The woofer is only rated to 60 Hz, so don’t expect a booming bass response. It supports all flavors of iPod (Phone, nano, classic, etc.). It’ll charge, playback, even let you control them with the included remote. My stereo system is centered around my computer, so listening from my iPod is something I only do on the subway. But if you really want one, you can pick it up at your local consumer electronics retailer in any of four fantastic colors for $299.95. 

It seems that Apple has such of thirst for flash memory (for use in its iPods, iPhones, maybe tablets, etc.) that it’s having a profound effect on the flash suppliers. Tighter supplies, uncertainty about where to go for more flash, etc. Apple gets most of its flash memory from Samsung, but other people get flash from Samsung, too, and now they’re all, “Um, hey Samsung, do you have any flash for us?” Then Samsung shrugs its shoulders, “Yeah, man, Apple just paid us $80 zillion for the lot of it. You’ll have to go somewhere else. Sorry.”

With Samsung so busy filling Apple orders, other companies have stepped in to fill the void. The biggest one is called IM Flash, based in Utah (of all places!).

How does affect you? I’m going to guess that it won’t affect you in the least. Where Apple (or Microsoft, or Dell, or YourFavoriteCompany) buys its flash should never cross your mind. I just found it interesting that Apple needs flash oh so bad that it’s freaking out other companies, and directly impacting their behavior. Oh, Apple. I like you better when you were the underdog.

via 9 to 5 Mac

Growing up, was there anything worse than being called a rich kid? Granted, it was probably just a case of petty jealousy—I wish I had a power wheel!—but man oh man did the rich kid win no friends. Fast-forward a few years, and the rich kid isn’t just flaunting his new lunchbox and Spider-Man sneakers, no sir: he’s driving a brand new car and checking his Facebook on his shiny, new iPhone 3G S. Or, a long way of say the obvious: Apple products are popular with kids from wealthy parents.

Such is the conclusion of the 18th annual~! Piper Jeffery Teen Survey. The survey asks kids All Sorts of Stuff, but what concerns us right now is the fact that, yeah, Apple products do really well with teens of wealthy parents. That’s not surprising: compare the price of a entry level laptop made by Apple and one made by any other manufacturer. Considering that, at most, the average teen is just using a laptop to browse the Web, write a report or two, and maybe kill a few hours playing The Sims or whatever, then yeah: perhaps $999 is a bit much to spend.

Hard numbers:

• 15 percent of all teens own an iPhone (last year it was 8 percent)

• 22 percent plan to buy an iPhone in the next 22 months

• 87 percent own iPods (at this point, who doesn’t own an iPod of some sort, unless you’re diamtricaly opposed to the device—if you can, give the Zune HD a shot. I cannot say enough nice things about it, other than it totally killed my book-buying budget last month!)

• 40 percent legally buy music online (which means that the other 60 percent are either still buying CDs and ripping them, or they all use BitTorrent to grab entire artist catalogues in seconds), and of those 40 percent 93 percent use iTunes. What, no love for Amazon MP3? (Not that this matters, since Spotify will all but eliminate desktop music piracy unless the record labels kill it with too many ads.)

To paraphrase Grandpa Simpson, I was a lot of things growing up: a nerd, a cry baby, a scardy cat, a halfway decent Little Leaguer (but who wasn’t at age 13?) a Communist for some reason, but I was not a rich kid. The big thing for us (my two younger brothers and I) was the occasional video game, like for a birthday present or for Christmas. Granted, cellphones didn’t really exist in the 1990s, so what do I know? (Nothing, thank you.)

Flickr

I remain skeptical. My favorite genres of games are impractical on a no-button touchscreen (shooters, platformers, RPGs), and it’s going to take some doing to convince major players like EA and Ubisoft to break exclusivity or first-dibs deals with the other guys. Still, the more games the better, and there are plenty of possibilities for good stuff on the iPod. Just don’t pretend a virtual D-pad is in any way acceptable.

The iPod nano has become very popular with the gym crowd. It’s light, doesn’t skip, and is inexpensive enough that if it gets stolen, it’s not the end of the world. The bad news is, many gyms are banning the new version, due to the camera. Seems that recording devices in general are verboten in gym locker rooms, and something small and concealable like an iPod nano is exactly what they are trying to avoid.

So should Apple make a nano without a camera? The features of the new version make it perfect except for that pesky camera. Perhaps gyms could allow you to check your nano before you go into the locker room, and then pick it up on the way out. One word of warning, if you do smuggle your nano in, please don’t forget that there is ‘good naked’ and ‘bad naked’. Oh, and don’t buy the yellow one.

[via Slashgear]

Before you all say it at once, I know the Zune has had an FM tuner all along. But the new iPod nano just got one of its own and so FM is all of a sudden relevant again. A recent online survey by VisionCritical of 1,185 American adults shows that 66% have an active interest in the pause-and-rewind feature of the built-in FM radio. Plus, it’s the third most popular feature of the iPod nano only after the new, larger screen and the video camera. But how many people will really use it?

I for one would use it and according to this survey, I’m not alone. Having thousands of MP3s is nice, but there is something about being able to tune a live broadcast that still appeals to me. Maybe it’s the trust that I have in my local rock station to always play something cool. Or it’s the excitement of not know what’s coming up because even though you might have loaded your iPod with tons of MP3s and hit shuffle, there is still a level of predictability. But I like FM radio and would use it as long as the tuner pulls in stations without any rigmarole.

The survey also shows 55% of 18-34 year-olds like the ability to see what’s playing thanks to the nano’s RDS display. Only 45% of the same demographic are “very interested” in the ability to tag a song for future purchase though. Personally, I don’t know if FM needs saving, but the tuner within the nano will likely introduce more people to radio if they get tired of what they loaded on their iPod. [via 9to5mac]

This is it under direct light. I promise I’ll get more pictures soon.

Long Version: The Samson StudioDock 3i is a set of professional quality studio monitors that someone installed a iPod dock and a USB sound card in. The result is nothing short of amazing. Computer speakers and iPod docks are normally, shall we say, not of the highest quality. These Samsons really buck that trend, providing an excellent quality sound for a quite reasonable $150.

The 3i version has a 3.25 inch woofer in each side, coupled with a 25mm tweeter. The response is great across the board, no matter if you are listening if you are listening to Jay-Z or Gordon Lightfoot. The front of the right speaker has a volume control, aux stereo input, a stereo headphone output (which mutes the speakers), and a blue LED power indicator. The top of the speaker has a slot and connector for a your iPod. The back of the speaker has a USB cable connection, stereo RCA inputs, and the connection for the wires running to the left speaker. And despite the fact that they’re rated at only 15 watts each, they put out an impressive amount of sound and don’t distort at high volumes. I also think that I should mention that these speakers did in fact come out last year, and were named one of Time magazine’s best inventions of 2008.

Recommendation: Buy ‘em. They are a great set of speakers for a reasonable price. I wish I would have included this in our back to school feature, because they’d be great for a dorm room. In fact, after I sent these back to Samson, I went out and bought a set for my home office. Retail is $150, but I found them on Amazon for $85.

A comment from earlier in the day sparked a bit of a conversation in the official CrunchGear chat room: what’s to stop someone from ditching the iTunes-iPod “universe” and switching to the Zune HD? (We’re all pretty keen on the Zune HD for whatever reason.) Those of you with iPhones are pretty much stuck using iTunes, but what’s to stop someone from saying, “You know, I’ve used an iPod in one form or another for the past five years, so I think I’m gonna try something new for a change.”? Let’s see what’s up.

I don’t think the excuse that you have a Mac is valid anymore. Any Mac bought within the past three years can run Windows, so whether you poney up the money for the operating system or acquire some other way (I don’t care what you do, and that’s not relevant right now anyway), you can run whatever software the Zune HD comes with. And what does your iTunes library consist of: a couple (thousand) MP3s? Those will play just fine on the Zune HD, and you can easily set it up so that all your music syncing is done within Windows. How often do you really need to sync your music library with your portable player?

I know in my case, what I’d do is continue to use Mac as my everyday operating system—I’m not switching to Windows full time just to use a portable device—then boot into Windows like once a week just to sync the library, download updates, etc. Thanks to things like Spotify, I don’t really need to have a huge library of songs constantly on my computer. So, host my library on the Windows partition, then keep a smaller one/use spotify for when I’m in Mac OS X. I get to use the Zune HD and my preferred OS.

Again, iPhone users are pretty much stuck with iTunes, but if you have an iPhone then you probably have little need for a Zune.

All I’m saying is, it’s probably not as hard to switch from an iPod-iTunes combo as you might think. This only refers to music, of course, because if you’re buying movies and TV shows from iTunes you’ve pretty much committed yourself to iTunes.

Bose had some sort of official unveiling in New York earlier today, but I didn’t want to leave Matt and Doug manning the site all by themselves, so I didn’t attend. This is what I missed: the Bose SoundDock 10, a $599 (?!) iPhone/iPod dock that weighs some 19 pounds. It’s rather big, yes.

So what does $600 buy you these days? By all accounts it gets you a dock, all right, the same kind we’ve seen for so many years now. Of course, Bose will swear up and down that it’s unlike any dock you’ve ever heard, and while that may be true, it’s not like the iPhone can play FLACs (without tracking down an App via Cydia). So if you think your 320 kbps MP3s (or worse: iTunes-purchased files) warrant such extensive acoustics, then by all means.

There’s a pretty big subwoofer in there, too, just in case you’re listening to hip-hop all day long.

Of course, you could be one of those Bose haters. If you are, then you probably don’t want anything to do with this. But I’m sure Bose knows its market and what it wants…

It’ll be available on September 21, the day after the new Pearl Jam album.

When iFixit tore apart the new iPod nano, there was nothing surpising. But that’s not the case with the new iPod touch. It seems that the Broadcom BCM4329 chip found at the heart of the portable supports 802.11n WiFi and FM transmitting. But they also found something a bit more interesting related to the rumored camera.

Even the iPhone 3GS doesn’t have these features but we’re sure most users would love to have them. No one would turn down faster WiFi or the ability to stream music to a FM radio without an adapter. Both features would open up even more possibilities from the App developers.

Although it should be noted that an included FM transmitter would kill off more than a few products from 3rd party companies that pay hefty royalty fees to Apple and Apple likes its money. Now just because the chip supports these features, doesn’t mean that they will be enabled anytime soon. But I guess there is always the possibility.

Besides those surprises, the folks at iFixit also noted that there seems to be enough room above the Broadcom chip for a small camera supporting the well documented rumor. After all, we saw cases after cases meant for an iPod touch with a camera, but maybe that rumor of component shortages was actually true and it caused Apple to push back the announcement – or delay it permanently.

[iFixit via Giz]

Hell, the music in the ad above – Capture Us – is more rock ‘n’ roll than Norah Jones was yesterday at the iPod event. The same goes for the iPod Touch 3g ad – Next Level Fun – after the break. But they aren’t the The Beatles either.

via MacDailyNews

A small, California-based company by the name of Apple had an event today where it unveiled many new things. In case you were AFE (away from Earth) for the past few hours, here’s what you missed.

• The iPod nano now has a digital camera. It also has FM radio capability for the first time ever, finally ushering Apple into the year 2002. Neat: Live Pause lets you utilize a cache of as much as 15 minutes. I wonder if it’ll no longer be cool to like the band Phoenix now, seeing as though they’re so prominently featured in the glossy iPod photos.

• The iPod touch got a storage bump, with 8GG, 32GB, and 64GB models. The 64GB is also marginally “faster” for some inexplicable reason.

• The iPod classic is not dead, and now (again, actually) has a 160GB hard drive.

• iTunes 9.0 was released. Manage your iPhone Apps right from iTunes! Watch videos and consume all sorts of bonus content from the music and movies you buy with iTunes LP! Transfer music and movies throughout your house with Home Sharing. And Genius Mixes creates up to 12 Genius playlists automatically.

• iPhone OS 3.1. Genius for all your Apps (which means that it’ll recommend new Apps for you to try based on your current collection). And you can now buy ringtones from the four big record labels for $1.99 a pop. (Note: you’re a darn fool if you actually buy ringtones.)

iPod Nano will now have a Cover Flow, Genius Mix, and Voice Over support, allowing you to read out the names of songs as they’re played. The Nano also has a build-in pedometer and voice recorder.

The Nanos come in red, pink, orange, silver, black, purple, blue, green, and yellow. They will cost $179 for 16GB and $149 for the 8GB.

Apple just reaffirmed the theory that new iPods will be announced today by cutting the price of every iPod except the Shuffle. The 32GB touch is now $279 down from $399, the 16GB is now $249 down from $299, and the 8GB model is $189 instead of $229. Also, the 8GB nano is now $129 and the 16GB is $149. And while the rumor is that the Classic will be cut from the team today, it is now cheaper at $229 instead of $249. New models are coming, but why the price drop instead of just shifting the inventory to the clearance department when the models are announced later today?

Well, remember that rumor that the new iPods could be delayed? It’s probably true and Apple needs to do something to appease its waiting masses. A modest price drop will likely get some folks to jump while others wait for the new models to because available. As of late when Apple announces new iPods, they have been available immediately at Apple Stores and online, but that might not be the case today. We’ll find in a bit.

Cygnett might be in a world of trouble. The retailer has a set of photos up showing off its cases for the iPod touch 3G and Nano 5G and *gasp* the pics show an actual product that fits all the leaked descriptions. The almighty Steve Jobs isn’t going to like this too much.

We’ll go out on a limb here and say these are the real deal. I mean, why not? They fit the description, the images appeared today as if timed for an event, and accessory makers generally get at least dummy units to showcase in their product shots. It all seems very plausible. We’ll find out later today. [Cygnett via Gizmodo]