Steve says, “The strongest iPod lineup we’ve ever had.”

Earli­er today Apple unveiled the new look of the iPod product line, start­ing with the tiny Shuffle and end­ing with a slim­mer and more power­ful iPod Touch. New form factors, new hard­ware and new cap­ab­il­it­ies were evid­ent across the product line, and a few of the iPre­dic­tions turned out to be pretty close to accurate 

Here’s what you can expect to see on retail shelves (yes in Future Shop and Future Shop Online) in the com­ing weeks:

Updated iPod Shuffle:

• People loved the size — wanted but­tons. They’re back.
• Clip on and go.
• Playl­ists.
• Voi­ceOver –It speaks the playl­ists, song, artist, mixes, etc.
• Geni­us Playlists.
• 15 hrs of battery.

Updated iPod Nano:

• Smal­ler & lighter
• Touch-screen — no clickwheel
• Screen can rotate (change orientation)
• Mul­ti­t­ouch (like a tiny iPod Touch)
• Clip on and go.
• FM Radio, Nike+, Pedometer
• 24 hrs of battery.

Updated iPod Touch:

• Ret­ina dis­play (same as iPhone 4 — 4x pixels, 326ppi, 24-bit col­our, LED backlight)
• Apple A4 chip (same as iPhone)
• 3‑axis Gyro (pos­i­tion­al awareness)
• Front facing cam­era (for FaceTime)
• Rear facing HD camera
• iOS 4.1 with Game Centre (Apple’s online gam­ing network)
• Bat­tery (40 hrs music, 7 hrs video)

And to tie it all togeth­er, a new iTunes:

• Improved lay­out
• Improved music discovery
• Ping — iTunes Social Media net­work (Social music dis­cov­ery, fol­low­ing, friends, post­ing opin­ions, charts con­certs, etc)

My thoughts?
The iPod Touch is over­due. These are the fea­tures that should have been in the last update. That being said, this is a great little port­able device. More than an iPad mini — more like an iPhone with out the phone part. Worth investigationg.

The iPod Shuffle and Nano are pretty close in func­tion­al­ity and size to cause a bit of con­fu­sion in the mar­ket­place these days. If I was going to buy a music play­er, I’d go for the Nano. It just offers so much more.

Ping. This is dis­rupt­ive for online music social media sites like blip.fm, Groove­Shark, Last.fm, and Pan­dora. I won­der how this will work out.

Your thoughts? what was miss­ing, what did you expect from Apple this time around? Con­sid­er­ing jump­ing into iTunes to check out Ping? Com­ments wel­come in the Usu­al Place.

This post of is one of many I pub­lish weekly at the Future Shop Techb­log. Read more of my stuff here.