The “Let’s Rock” media event is completed. Turns out the announcements were largely leaked beforehand. Unusual then that Apple was ‘quietly’ touting the event to media outlets as something special.

Personally I hope there are some speed and stability optimisations in iTunes 8, since the Genius recommendation feature couldn’t be less interesting to me. I have eclectic tastes. Last.fm can’t tell me what new music I’m going to like, Genius won’t either. I’m also not going to start downloading HD movies and TV shows from iTunes any time soon.

The curved iPod nano looks nice and all — I prefer the tall form factor to the short they went with last year. Whether the curving of the screen will cause distortion is a worrying question. The inclusion of the accelerometer is interesting, if only for the slightly dissonant control scheme. Switching from portrait to landscape also realigns the controls. Not a huge deal, but how intuitive it turns out is yet to be seen. Also, Apple can tout their efforts to create as environmentally friendly a nano as they can, but as long as they’re the #1 marketshare holder on a popular consumer product, Greenpeace is going to slap them for publicity.

The new nano’s are at 8gb and 16gb, at unsurprising prices. Which sadly suggested that the late rumour would be true: no iPod touch capacity bump. I shouldn’t be too disappointed, since the capacity I’m after (32gb) is already there. The internal speaker and physical volume buttons are greatly appreciated features. No GPS, which always sounded like a wishful feature (that I wasn’t wishing for). No camera, a wishful feature I was wishing for. They’ve stuck with their shiny iPod-ass too. Bastards. They also didn’t include a mic, but have introduced a new set of overpriced headphones with inline mic and controls. So that’s mixed. Maybe this will allow a Skype on the touch. Maybe not.

In general it’s a pretty routine round of updates. Not terrible, but not particularly interesting either. What was Apple’s “big news”? I can’t see anything there. The emphasis on iPhone/iPod touch as a gaming platform was curious, but just saying you’re competing with the DS and the PSP doesn’t make it so.