The invites are out, the date is confirmed — Apple will be holding a special event next week, on September 9th, 2009. Over the past few years, this has been the time that Apple introduces new music products, specifically new versions of their popular iPods. Last year, we got the second generation iPod touch and a super tiny iPod nano. What will we get this year?

We will probably see a new version of iTunes. The speculation is that Apple will integrate social media features into iTunes 9 — how they will do that is still a question mark. A good bet is that The Beatles could (finally) release their back catalogue on iTunes. It sure took them long enough to do it.

What’s (almost) certain is that we will see an improved iPod nano. Certain case manufacturers have already leaked out that there will be a 5th generation nano.

We will probably see a new iteration of the iPod touch. The iPod touch is now essentially an iPhone without cellular (mobile) network support. Everything else is almost the same. Will we see GPS, digital compass and a built-in camera on the iPod touch? I think we’ll get a camera and some sort of HD playback support.

There are a couple of wildcards for next week’s event. Will we finally see the mythical Apple tablet? And will Steve Jobs make a return to the stage in Cupertino?

Stay tuned.

Look, we have a (Chinese) New Year present from Apple! Apple has released a new software update for the iPhone (2G and 3G) and iPod touch. Version 2.2.1 for the iPhone has the usual bug fixes and improvements, including improved stability for Safari, and a fix for an issue where some images saved from Mail didn’t display correctly in the Camera Roll.

The update for the iPod touch also fixes an issue that caused some Apple Lossless files to skip during playback.

For a “bug fix” update, this is software update weighs in the same as a full update. The iPhone update is a tad under 246MB in size. If you have a jailbroken or newly yellowsn0w-unlocked iPhone, wait a while before applying this update.

If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, you must try ebooks. It’s just such a natural use of the form factor. Being a heavy (ie : daily) reader of ebooks, I have a couple of ebook reading software on my iPhone. Teleread has a comprehensive overview of all the current ebook reader options for the iPhone.

Chris Meadows over at Teleread reviews the following ebook software for the iPhone :
- BookShelf
- eReader
- Stanza
- iSilo
- AppEngines (bundled eBook plus Reader)

I personally use eReader (for eReader formats and Palm Doc) and the free, ad-supported version of BookShelf, called BookShelfLT (for DRM-free Mobipocket books).

As an aside, Chris Meadows (I think it’s the same person) also wrote Robotech fanfiction which I read while I was in college — that was my introduction to the world of e-text.

At their “Let’s Rock” event a couple of days ago, Apple unveiled the latest version of the iPod touch. The already thin iPod touch got a bit thinner, and a bit classier, with a metal body.

New features include built-in speakers, hardware volume controls and built-in Nike+ transmitter. It also has a new firmware update, version 2.1 which brings among other things the Genius recommendation service, which optimises your song groupings.

Apple spent a lot of time at the event doing demonstrations of games, for example Spore Origins, Need for Speed and Real Soccer. While the iPod touch has a long way to go in order to replace the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP any time soon, it makes a pretty decent PDA already.

In terms of software, the iPod touch has a pretty good platform already. You get email and calendaring as default, and these two support synchronization with Microsoft Exchange. The contact list is integrated and quite full-featured, too. The other two default applications that Palm has are Notes and To Do list. While the Notes feature on the iPod touch is nothing to shout about (it doesn’t sync, for example), we now have a big enough base of third party software that we have multiple options for Notes and To Do, and many are available for free.

The iPod touch is about the same form factor as the last from Palm, the Palm TX. There are several differences, of course. The iPod touch does not have an expansion slot for additional storage. However, you could argue that with built-in storage from 8GB to 32GB, you don’t need the SD slot. The main weakness of the iPod touch today is that it doesn’t have Bluetooth, which means you can’t pair it with your phone for Internet access on the go.

In terms of affordability, the iPod touch version 2.0 seems to hit all the right price points: US$229 for 8GB of storage, US$299 for 16GB, and US$399 for 32GB. These prices are between US$70-100 lower than the previous versions. In comparison, the Palm TX is still available — at the price of $399. Palm needs to either reduce the price of the Palm TX, or remove it from the market. At the moment, it looks just outdated and overpriced.

In the meantime, if you are looking for a dedicated PDA, the iPod touch could be just the device for you.

I love ebooks, and I love the iPhone. For the longest time, I was very frustrated because of how difficult it was to get books on the iPhone. The desire to read Cory Doctorow’s latest work, Little Brother, drove me to dig a little deeper and I am happy to say that it’s actually not an impossible task! Note that this method should also work with the iPod touch.

Here’s what you need to do :
1. Get a jailbroken iPhone. There are many ways to jailbreak your iPhone. Please be aware that this may break (“brick”) your phone and void your warranty. That said, I used ZiPhone to jailbreak my iPhone and it was quite painless process.

2. Once your iPhone is jailbroken, you should have a new icon on your iPhone called Installer. This is installer.app, a fantastic tool to browse, download, install and manage third party applications on your iPhone.

3. Using Installer, find and install Books.app. This is an ebook reader for the iPhone. There’s a Books category in Installer so you can immediately install some ebooks to read.

Now, that wasn’t so difficult, right? So how do we get more ebooks on the iPhone? This is the not-so-simple part. There are a few ways to do it (using SCP, iPhuc, etc), however they all require quite a bit of technical ability. I found a simpler way to do it, and it involves manybooks.net.

Manybooks.net is a huge repository of publicly available ebooks in a variety of formats (PDF, Mobipocket, Palm Doc, HTML, etc). It also has a mobile version which works well with the iPhone.
* Go to manybooks.net and create and account. This is free.
* Create a bookshelf. You can browse the manybooks.net site and add ebooks to your bookshelf.
* Open Installer.app on your iPhone
* Tap the “Sources” tab at the bottom of the screen
* Tap “Edit” then “Add” and enter the URL for your new shelf – something like http://manybooks.net/shelf/38
* Tap “Done”
* Switch to the “Install” tab and select the ManyBooks category to see your selections.

This is where I faced a few issues. After installing a book, Installer.app would give an error message. However, when I open Books.app, the ebook was indeed successfully installed.

Hopefully, once we have the iPhone App Store in place, we will have an easier way to browse, purchase, download and read ebooks on the iPhone. In the meantime, I’m quite happy with this method.

Now, back to reading Little Brother…