During past night, between thursday and friday (CET), one of Apple’s localized websites has shown for few hours what seemed to be a trace of the things to come next wednesday, when Apple will announce “one more thing”
During past months there were a lot of rumors about video functions in iPod and a lot of denying by Steve Jobs and other executives at Cupertino about a product like that.
Those could be misleadings, but the iPod video seems to be a real product.
Video Ads could not be ready right now on Cupertino servers, but when someone will press “enter” button they will be online, probably it will happen few seconds after Steve Jobs presentation in California (and live sat tv feed in London for European press).
A link was active that night and it was related to South African Apple website. The URL www.apple.com/za/itunes/video (now offline, or re-directing to this iTunes page) shown two ad movies about iPod Video.
It’s not so important to know that Apple created some new silhouette ads (two sizes, 8,1 MB and 23 MB), but this has been conceieved as the confirmation that iPod Video is real and it will work with iTunes, so “iTunes + iPod Video”…
If you take this image as the final draft for the iPod Video to come (but it seems impossible due to the strict control on Apple’s new products) and you watch through a magnifier lens you can suppose that the iPod Video will be: white (at least), it will be small but not so small because it seems to be bigger than the dancing rasta (?) silhouette hand, it will be a vertical style iPod (as usual) and it will have a display but smaller than the half size of the longest side. A
Superfuous to say it will be Mac and PC compatible.
The movies, also on the online period of that page, were not available to download and they still continue to be unavailable now.
Just a misleading or a trace of things to come?
[update] The picture has been shown at the WWDC 2004 conveference (see 07:50 from the beginning of the video starting at this page
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc04/
so no trace of the new iPod but a strange beavhiour of the South African web site preparing space or the October 12th event.
