By: Steph Dlugon
Apple’s “It’s Only Rock and Roll” music event took place today in San Francisco. The event received massive attention, including live coverage by several online bloggers.
Though the event targeted Apple’s music-related product line, a lot of statements were made about the iPhone and iPod Touch.
CEO Steve Jobs announced some pretty impressive stats:
- 30 million iPhones have been sold in the past 2 years
- There are 75,000 apps currently available
- 1.8 billion apps have been downloaded (this number doesn’t include updates)
Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing touted the iPod Touch as a major gaming platform. 220 million iPods have been sold to date. 20 million of those were the iPod Touch. According to Schiller, the Touch is a better gaming platform than Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) or the Nintendo DS. He goes on to state that there are over 21,000 game and entertainment title available for the iPhone OS. Nintendo offers 3,600 and Sony lags behind with 600.
There’s a new pricing structure for the iPod Touch too.
8 GB - $199
32 GB - $299
64 GB - $399
The latest iPhone OS (3.1) was also released today. The free update is available to iPhone and iPod Touch users who currently have 3.0. Eric Zeman of Information Week wrote about one of the key features of 3.1. The new OS “will give iPhone users the ability to turn on Apple’s Genius feature within the Apps Store. With the feature enabled, the Apps Store will recommend applications for users based on what they’ve already downloaded from the Apps Store.”
