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So I wake up this morning and check the usual technology blogs to find that the Apple Store is down for updates. The footer shows 403 comments, so the insane discussion has already started.

“Maybe they are doing five models instead of three.”
“Maybe they are adding Santa Rosa”
“I bet they’re new iPods!”

The fever pitch builds until finally, “They just bumped the CPU speed, otherwise it’s the same.” Follow that up with the eventual “This sucks, I’m just going to go buy a Dell.”

As demented and sad as it is, that’s the social fervor that comes with each Apple product announcement. Prognosticators telling the future as if they had an inside line to Jobs himself standing virtually alongside those who proclaim to be clueless and just bought a MacBook yesterday wondering if they could exchange it for the new one.

Maybe the whole Web 2.0 thing is more about product marketing than socialization after all.

You tell me, is it? Microsoft Ultimate Keyboard Bluetooth, rechargeable, backlit, tons of Vista keystroke goodies, what else could you want? Looks like a winner to me, but I’d have to try it first. My current G15/G5 combo are awesome for games, but since I never play them anymore it makes me wonder what else could benefit my typing action. I’m more thinking home theater/media center at this point. But who knows.

Well, the keynote is done and the major sites have all the updates. The key products include:

iPhone
(Shipping in June)
Far beyond any expectations, the iPhone was a serious power hit. I mean, this thing is so far beyond what I expected I think anyone else that tries to announce a portable media device is going to just have to crawl in a hole and die. Seriously, nothing is even close.

iTV
(Shipping in Feburary)
Now you can take iTunes beyond the desktop, beyond the laptop, and beyond your pocket. Put it directly on your big screen TV with the new iTV.

Airport Extreme
(Shipping in Feburary)
While not officially mentioned, the new network base station to complement today’s news.

So far, Mac Mini upgrades to Core 2 Duo, Mac Pro upgrade to Quad Xeon, and a few other expected items are MIA.

A few things of note I’ve seen so far announced at CES:

Sandisk Sensa View
In leiu of a full-screen video iPod, this could certainly fit the bill for those with video on the brain.

Is that it? Well, for now. Everything else is pretty much expected. Bigger LCDs, bigger plasmas, HD camcorders, tons of media players, new phones for those who haven’t discovered the BlackBerry.

I’m anxious for MacWorld tomorrow, the CES for those of us that really don’t care about the rest.

SanDisk has released a 32GB SSD for the consumer market. Based on the performance and power numbers, this monster is going to be sweet. Extreme speed and half the power of a hard disk make this technology a solid winner in the mobile marketplace. They say it is capable of 100 times the IO operations of a regular disk drive. I find that hard to believe, but who am I to doubt product marketing info?

Well, the rumor is that HP is developing a system of using LEDs to backlight a flat panel instead of the long used CCFL (cold-cathode flourescent light). The benefits should be obvious (solid stable color output, wide color gamut, basically, all that good stuff) based on what is happening in the RPTV market (see the Samsung post).

Rumor also says that Apple will use the technology in an upcoming flat panel device (MacBook Pro Core 2 Quad perhaps). If so, that would be a good sign if the technology turns out to be sweet.

Of course, this will probably just be a start, with regular LCD TV soon benefiting from the same advantages.

If Apple falls short of having a full-screen display with touch-bezel technology for the v6 iPod, then they need to at least scale the size of the display to reach that of the Zune. A 3.0″ (or slightly larger) screen would help market some of those videos. Without going full screen, Apple will have to stick to the 4:3 aspect ratio in order to leave room for the scroll wheel. If they do that, they should add the easy ability (perhaps using an orientation sensor) to rotate the display for landscape viewing (either lefty or righty friendly, considering the symetrical nature of the iPod controls).

This would make watching widescreen adaptations of television programming enjoyable instead of the greatly reduced visuals we get today with the 2.5″ screen. The best portable experience I’ve had with HDTV-sourced programming has been watching CSI:Miami on a Sony PSP (using PMP Video @ 480×272 native). The only problem with the PSP is you need darkness to enjoy it since the display is so reflective. But the depth of colors was amazing.

So wake up Apple and give us a bigger display, even if you can’t muster the full front panel.

With the release of the Zune, music sharing has become available on a portable device. However, the implementation is pretty weak — at least in my opinion. The 3×3 rules, while seemingly sensible, do not really address the real benefit of wireless. Apple already has a wireless protocol with Bon Jour (previously Rendezvous). A multicast method of identifying and communicating with remote music-enabled devices, Bon Jour is what enables you to share iTunes libraries and play music remotely on the Airport Express.

With the new iPod, Apple should add 802.11b/g (including an on/off switch, buried deep in the menu system of course) and allow it to participate in ad-hoc (for unit-to-unit sharing) as well as infrastructure networking. Once network enabled, the iPod could use the same protocols that iTunes uses for music sharing allow the iPod to see music shared on desktop computers at home (like an iMac, Mac Mini, or a Windows desktop), other iPods in the area, and some of the network network attached storage systems (NAS) such as the DNS-323 from D-Link.

The iPod would also have the ability to locate and use remote speakers just like iTunes. Not only should this work with the Airport Express, but any iTV device that Apple releases. In fact, I’d like to be able to stream to a Mac Mini attached to my HDTV system via the optical output in that device. Since the Mac Mini is potentially an iTV box on steroids, it should be treated like any other iTunes enabled device on the network. I guess streaming to the PC should also be allowed (while running iTunes, allowing music to be routed through the speakers).

All of these streaming features would be great, but there could also eventually be network-enabled car stereos that could be used as remote speakers using Bon Jour. This would seriously help establish the audio playback and audio control protocols used by iTunes as a defacto standard. The protocol is open and tools exist to build utilities to remotely control iTunes, it would just be a matter of time before you could remotely control your car stereo from your iPod. Not to mention play your music library on your iPod from your car stereo.

These consumer-oriented features really wake-up the iPod to make it a more social experience (no cliche intended to the Zune) and could really bury the competition until they license the patents from Apple to make their players play nicely on the shared network. By using some tricks to keep power consumption low (such as reduced transmission power, low power sleep modes, etc.), battery life could be reasonable and even unchanged if the user simply turns it off.