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.

Eric Zeman at Information Week has earned his ad-impression quota with this particular gem of inflammatory gibberish:

According to hacker Jonathan Zdziarski, the iPhone can “phone home” to tell Apple what apps are installed, and if Apple doesn’t like what it sees on your iPhone, it can kill the offending application.

Oh man. Apple, please tell me you didn’t open this can of worms for real.

Oh man. For real? For reals real? Ok, the problem here is in a misinterpretation of what Zdziarski reported. That is, it is the iPhone that does the checking, not Apple. The iPhone doesn’t give Apple a list of installed apps, but rather it retrieves a list of blacklisted apps. It is a small difference, but a pretty significant one. The article is feeding a general paranoia that the iPhone “phones home” and reports user actions to Big Brother. Is it technically possible? Sure. Is there yet any indication of this being the case? No.

Of course it’s worth pointing out the redundancy of the iPhone sending a list to Apple of all the Apps you’ve purchased and installed. Apple knows this already — you bought them from Apple, Apple sent you a receipt, Apple keeps track of what Apps you’ve purchased and reminds you when there’s an update to the App.