Apply sends out some iPods complete with a virus, just for Windows.

I think the best of this is where they blame Microsoft more then take responsibility.

The Zune’s price has been announced, at $249.99.  It has a thirty gig drive, and a bigger screen then the iPod.

 While I was at the company meeting, the guy sitting behind me had one.  He talked about how it was pretty intuitive to use.  After seeing it, I take back my previous statement about it not being sexy.  The screen is really nice.

They demo’ed this technology at the company meeting, and this little blurb doesn’t really tell the potential of it.  It looks pretty fun.

If you’ve heard about Zune, you might be interested to know that more information was released about it today, including a new video, including that it doesn’t just encompass a music player, but also the services to support it.  And it comes in white, black, and… brown.

Yes, brown.  I’ve seen pictures.  It is not sexy.

The blog for Windows Vista Shell, this probably falls into the category of “Things only Nari cares about”.  The Shell is most easily summarized as all the things in an Operating System that aren’t an application, in case you weren’t sure what all the Shell encompasses.

I put the Beta 2 release of Windows Vista on my Macbook Pro very shortly after I got it.  It required tweaking only a handful of things (only one or two, I think), but this is the site I used to guide me in the installation process and I’ve found it to be fairly useful.  I’ll be upgrading to the Release Candidate 1 of Windows Vista soon, so I’ll likely be looking at this site again.

Similar to the Apple launch of movies in the iTunes store, last week Amazon launched their Unbox Video Downloads, where you can purchase or rent TV show episodes, or entire movies, even offering a free television show episode for you to try it — or $1.99 off a movie.  (First time’s always free…)

I decided to try it today, and I’m less then impressed.  The client that’s required to download will not install on Windows Vista:  It requires XP SP2, or Windows Server 2003.  So I booted up the Dell notebook with XPSP2 and it installs, but it doesn’t see the episode that I purchase.  I wrote them a rather curt message to let them know of my experience, but either way it was a frustrating exercise.

[Three hours later:] I’m not sure if it was because I was low on disk space (I had a gig left, but apparently that wasn’t enough), or it was just slow in picking up the purchase, but after I cleared off some space on the hard drive, it automatically detected it had enough space and started downloading.  Very nice.  Still, that initial user experience wasn’t great.  Also, as a note, I thought I had closed it, when it instead went to the System tray.  Sneaky.

As I was trying to find Imogen Heap’s Hide and Seek this morning, I was frustrated by the fact that the iTunes store was down.  Then later, I went to go look for ways to spend money, and Apple Store was down.

 Turns out they were having a conference in San Fran, and were waiting until they were done talking to unveil the new iTunes 7 (the icons in the left nav are prettier, and now, movies are available), along with the iPod nano gets genetically merged with the Dodo’ed iPod Mini (and gets up to eight gigs), and the iPod Shuffle looks nothing like its former self.

 The iPod nano is available now, I think, but the iPod shuffle doesn’t show up until October.  And iTunes 7 now has a blue music note instead of green.