Then there was the App Store way. If you make sure you are in the iTunes App Store you could select log in, then create an account and select ‘none’ for payment method. This has sadly also been disabled it seems like.

The only way that is still working as far as I know is with a gift card. Before you panic and say how gift cards cost money, Starbucks has a promotion with Apple called the Song of the Week. These cards work as gift cards and are free right at the counter of most Starbucks.

Go to the iTunes Music Store select ‘Redeem’ it should be on one of the side columns. It will then ask you for your redeem code. Once you enter in it will ask you for your information, but under payment options you will now be able to select ‘none’.

Because you probably don’t want to head to the nearest Starbucks right now here are a few codes to get you started. Please post a comment letting me know you used them, and if you get a few please post them as a comment as well. Let’s snowball this

These Expire October 31, 2008:

1. RPWTA3WLWYNE
2. K9P3LPNXF3RN
3. 9H7RWRPXRLA9
4. APYLJL6NA474
5. 6JJ4YETHXJRT

It started with Steve joking about the rumors about his demise a few weeks ago, and that seemed to be the highlight of the morning.

He first talked about iTunes, iTMS has overtaken Best Buy and Wal*Mart as the biggest retailer of music anywhere. With iTunes 8.0 they introduce the Genious Playlist and Sidebar. The idea being that based on your music library and a selected song iTunes will automatically create a playlist for you that makes sense. The sidebar replaces the mini-store with recommendations based on your current selection.

He continued with the iPod Nano, and introduced the 4th generetion of these devices. Long LCD, and a interface that is very reminicent of the iPhone/iPod Touch. It’s the “thinnest iPod ever” and has the Genious Playlist built in.

Then moved on to the iPod Touch. With a sleek metal redesign it now looks better than the 3G plastic iPhone, it also got a pricing point of $229 and gets built in Genious Playlist and Nike+ support.

He mentioned a few iPhone/iPod touch games like Spore, FIFA and Need For Speed: Undercover, then they showed a new ad that places the iPod Touch as a portable gaming device, just like Sony’s PSP and Nintendo’s DS.

Wrapping up he announced update 2.1 for iPhone wich includes none of the new features it’s lesser sibblings got. Not even Genious Playlist (this might be included, no official word we’ll have to see on friday). In fact it’s just bugfixes.

Here is where the dissapointment begins.

I’ll start with the one that bothers me the most. iPhone is not getting Nike+. Apparently the iPhone is no longer an iPod. Back in January 2007 Steve Jobs called the iPhone the “Best iPod Ever”, this led me to believe that the iPhone is the top of the line iPod, and everything that works with iPod will work with iPhone because thats what top of the line means. I was obviously wrong. They are saying that there is some extra reciever that the 2G iPod Touch has that enables this to happen without the dongle. Whatever. It’s been about two months since the release of the iPhone 3G, they knew about this well in advance and they decided to not include this functionality on the iPhone 3G. I guess they expected people to buy new iPod Nanos or get themselves an iPod Touch now… but that makes no sense. The iPhone is the most expensive iPod, and within Apple’s plans, the iPhone is to take over the universe (projected 12M units sold this year). Adding features like Nike+, GPS and Genious Playlist to the iPhone further sets it appart from the rest of the “iPhone Killers” that are coming out this year. Splitting the market like this is really… well… dumb.

I was still kind of hoping that its because of the 3 leg system that Jobs setup back in WWDC, iTunes, iPhone, Mac. So there will be a later event that will add Nike+ functionality, and it’ll be worth the wait because it’ll include map support for running those trails around town, and maybe over the air sync. It just looks more and more like this won’t be the case. Theres already a discussion going on at the Apple Support forums about this and how Apple hasn’t even commented on updating the iPhone for dongle support. The whole reason why the Nike+ worked on the Nanos and not on the iPod/Classics was because of the Nano’s solid state drive, which the iPod Touch and iPhone have. This is really quite ridiculous. Which brings me up to…

Genious Playlist is really quite a half-baked idea and they are not jumping on the opportunity that an ailing Pandora is presenting. The Genious Sidebar kind of does this, it allows you to see what music you are missing and other music you might like, but really, iTunes Genious Radio would be awesome. Just imagine a service like Last.fm straight from iTunes. With server-saved playcounts and unlimited music streaming. This could be a monthly subscription service and will also boost their sales since you could one-click-buy any music you really enjoy. I, for instance, no longer travel around with my music collection, and depend solely on Last.fm’s radio for my music both old and new discoveries. It’s really wonderful, and it works over the air with my iPhone and it’s Last.fm application.

I have nothing to say about the new Nanos, I didn’t like the fatty, these look way better.

Another thing that I really don’t like, is how there just has not been a ‘One More Thing’ on any of the last keynotes. It just really kind of falls dead at the end since you would always wait for that one last thing where he would completely re-arrange paradigms and blow minds. This could be something as simple as starting a streaming service similar to Netflix’s on the AppleTV or as complicated as the AppleTV 3.0 rumors that are floating around.

I really also expected the announcement of the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. That was my fault. I still think they will be released sometime soon, before the holidays, but my 2 year old MacBook Pro has seen better days, mainly because I am an extreme power user and carry it everywhere I go. My old Toshiba didn’t last through 8 months of that, so imagine how happy I am with my 15″ MBP. I am really looking forward to a new 17″ MBP as soon as the redesign is set loose.

All in all, if you have an old iPod or if you just haven’t spent any money on the iPhone (and 3G)/iPod Touch 1G yet, this keynote opened lots of doors for you. But if you are already invested in a iPhone/iPod Touch, specially those with new iPhone 3Gs, this keynote was just sad. It was a wakeup call that tells you that the days of iPhone/iPod Touch parity are over, and theyre marketting them as separate things, not just “a poor mans iPhone” and the iPhone is no longer the one device to rule them all, since Apple now decided that there were things it can’t do.

Sadly the name, out of context, can also be read in english as something quite different. Unfortunate indeed.

What I will talk about is the lack of a Shopping Cart and the ridiculous pricing scheme concocted by the people at Apple. I understand why Apple decided against the shopping cart it is not a streamlined process and actually gives people an opportunity to think about the purchase before doing it. That is a big problem if you are trying to sell as many things as possible as -fast- as possible. I deal with user interaction on a everyday basis, I know this. This is about as far as they thought it through however, take a look at this:

These are all the applications by My Accounts To Go, a page you can see for yourself by clicking here. Appart from the completely hideous un-imaginative icon, you can notice that while one application is free the other two applications are $449.99. Yes, you read that right, these applications are four hundred fourty nine dollars and ninetynine cents… each. In the description of all 3 of the applications they specify the following “Customer information from Microsoft Dynamics GP or SAP BusinessOne accounting systems are now directly accessible fro your Apple iPhone”. Even though there is clearly one for Dynamics GP and another for SAP BusinessOne, there is only one demo for the two which means they are fairly similar looks wise, but their inner workings are entirely different.

Before you start hating on the price point please understand. These are enterprise applications. These are serious, mission critical, applications and My Accounts To Go will most likely give them support as such. When you buy enterprise applications you are paying for the support and the knowledge that the system is not going to randomly go down. For instance, if tomorrow I check this blog and its not there, I’m going to call my provider, Host Gator and ask them whats up and hopefully they can explain and give me a refund or some credit or something. If I get to work on monday and our server is down, Rackspace actually has some liability in that case. It is an enterprise class application. Same difference, and judging from some reviews the applications warrant the $449.99 price point, so that is not an issue.

The issue is that they are in the App Store to begin with and this is something that Apple needs to address soon. My Accounts To Go is too busy making enterprise applications to give their three applications different icons. So there is actually no way for you to identify them without reading the name. The name is ‘MyAccountsToGo – *’, meaning you have to get through the name of the company to get to what you really want to read which is what version it is that you are getting. Which is not a problem unless you are trying to buy it on the iPhone itself (imagine that…) where it looks like this:

Yes, the price is there, but I never want to be less than two taps away from buying a $449.99 application, and If I did want to buy such an application, I would not like It to be so easy to confuse it with the version I do not want.

I really do not understand if the My Accounts To Go team is unaware that this is how their applications are showing up in the store… or if they are expecting you to make that mistake. Do they not know that their name shows up on top of the application? That if you search, their company name is also a field that the search looks in so therefore the applications can be called different things? Why is this allowed in the App Store?

When Apple set out to create an App Store they wanted to create something where you can buy applications on a whim, but they also wanted to allow serious applications to be available and I applaud them for that because the iPhone is now, not a phone, it is a mobile platform and that is just a remarkable achievement, but this is ridiculous. Can’t they set a cap on the price of items that they show me? I dont want any application that is more than $20 dollars to show up on my iPhone if I am unable to turn off this 1-tap purchase thing. If not give me a switch, and make enterprise applications harder to get to, so I don’t randomly stumble across them during my every-day browsing. You know what? Just give me a SHOPPING CART.

The one application I bought on iTunes (for those of you interested, it was Things, which I talked about in an earlier post) was $9.99  plus about $0.30 cents of tax. What will this end up being with taxes? Why can’t I review my purchase in a screen that details what I’m buying, for how much and what tax will be involved in the transaction? This is an oversight by Apple and they should seriously fix it.

All is fun and games at the App Store until somebody accidentally taps on the purchase button, which is conveniently the price button on the iPhone after one tap, and ends up with a $500 dollar app he/she has no use for whatsoever.

Also… My Accounts To Go, at $450 a pop, you can afford distinct icons for each one of those applications, get on it.