New iPods will be announced tomorrow, and none-to-early for me. Currently I have a fourth generation iPod that is on its last legs. Many times, I will be listening to a song or podcast and halfway through, it will simply skip to the next song. At other times, I will navigate to a song and my iPod takes forever to finally start playing. While it is searching, you can hear audible clicking as my hard drive tries and tries to find the MP3 file.I don’t know how long it will hold out. Hopefully long enough for me to save up the green to purchase one of the new iPods.

I hope the new iPods are cool….ie. have enough storage for my music collection. Apple has been edging ever closer to using just flash memory in its iPods. Right now, 8GB isn’t enough for me, and I don’t want to spend $499 to get 20GB. Also, the 5th generation iPod was the completely perfected version of the original iPod. It was as good as that form factor would ever get. I have a sneaking suspicion that the new iPod will be the first second (iPhone) generation of a new iPod interface. I don’t want to buy this one and have it be completely out-done by the 7th gen… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Whatever the form factor, I will probably be getting one.

Well, the wait is over and come 5:00 central time the first iPhones will go on sale. The caveat is that you will have to be in the eastern time zone. Apple has decided that there will be a rolling roll-out for the iPhone. They will go on sale at 6:00 pm in every timezone.

Right now, I am watching a live stream on justin.tv of a high school student who is waiting in line at a store in San Francisco.

It is interesting, and I am looking forward to what the fallout will be once these phones are out in the wild, but I am not going to get one. I believe that there will be some negative press following the release of the iPhone, but I still want to see one.

I think I will go around after work and see if there are people waiting to purchase the iPhone here in Northwest Arkansas.

Wow, if you were putting anything off until Hell froze over, well you might need to clear up some time on you daytimer. Hell hath frozen over because a major record label, EMI, has agreed to start putting tracks into the iTunes music library, sans Digital Rights Management.

This is great new. It shows that there may be a thawing in the thinking of major labels and how they market their product online. But, I’m afraid that may be a bit premature. I am adopting a wait and see attitude when it comes to labels going “unprotected”.

The tech community has been crying foul over DRM from the very get go. DRM does not protect content from pirates. DRM breaks content for upstanding customers. DRM in effect harms customers, who incidentally paid for the content, while doing nothing to stop the pirates who are the real problem.

I know there is going to be some illegal sharing, but if I know that I can get a great version of the content quickly and easily from a known source, I will take that over the malware infested waters of the sharing sites.

One of the main reasons I haven’t purchased more from the iTunes Store is that I didn’t want crippled AAC files that would transfer to my other devices. I have no incentive to be a pirate of content. I don’t want to give up my cherished bandwidth so that others who didn’t pay for the content could profit from my purchase. I do want to be able to listen to my content on my XBOX. (Which, my home computer can’t see my XBOX because the new version of Windows Media Player is broken, but that is another blog entry.)

Hurray for EMI for at least testing the waters. This is a major step towards what I see as an uptick in revenues for you company. I know I will buy more tracks if they are more useful to me.