Apple announces new iPod Nano and Touch. New iPhone 2.1 firmware on Friday

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As you probably all know by know, there wasn’t much in the way of excitement at last night’s Apple “Let’s Rock” event. There’s a new iPod Nano with a bigger screen and more storage; a new iPod Touch with the same curvy design as the iPhone 3G and built-in support for Nike+; and a new version of iTunes with a clever automatic playlist function (which we like) and a Genre list that can no longer be disabled (which we don’t’). Oh and the iPod Classic 160Gb has been discontinued. No one has that much music, apparently.

The new Nano is available in nine different colours, in 8Gb and 16Gb capacities (the previous 4Gb model is no more) for £109 and £149, respectively. Both have a 2.5in, 320 x 240 colour screen that, thanks to a built-in accelerometer, flips the image to landscape mode for movie-watching, just like on the iPod Touch and iPhone.

The redesigned iPod Touch comes in the same 8Gb, 16Gb and 32Gb capacities, with prices starting from £169. Design aside, the only notable changes are the addition of an external volume control and integrated support for Nike+, though you’ll still need to buy the necessary Bluetooth gadget to use it.

iPod Touch owners also get some new 2.1 firmware that fixes a few security issues and adds on-device support for the new iTunes 8 Genius playlist feature (essentially a ‘if you like that, you’ve love this’ auto playlist creator). The update also adds support for push email with Microsoft Exchange, along with an updated multilingual keyboard, multiple calendar support, a scientific calculator and an improved email attachment viewer – essentially the same features that the iPhone 2.0 update introduced. If you paid for the last iPod Touch update, the latest 2.1 update is free; if not, you’ll need to cough up £5.99 – and it's available now (iTunes link)

Apple didn’t have much to say about the 2.1 firmware update for the iPhone, other than it will be available on Friday and will fix a few things. And yes, that’s almost a direct quote. It is a free update, though. Since it’s more likely that the Earth will be sucked into a black hole than Apple will reveal a full list of firmware fixes and features, we’ll post more on the 2.1 update once we have it.

[Apple]

Update: iPhone Atlas reports that some iPod Touch owners are having sync problems with the new 2.1 firrmware. Apparently, iTunes displays the message: "The iPod cannot be updated. An unknown error has occurred (13213)."

Among the fixes for the 2.1 firmware is: "Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes". We guess this is one way of achieving it... Let us know in the comments if you have any 2.1 firmware issues.