So, three weeks after the hype and nearly paralytic excitement experienced by the week faithful on that fateful morning of September 12th, we can finally step back and take stock of what we’ve got.

 

Amazingly, the biggest upgrade of the day was absolutely free; iTunes 7 was launched, along with a movie download service (easily predictable from the giveaway ‘It’s Showtime’ invites), to rapturous applause and a whole lot o’ bugs.

 

But let’s start with the good stuff. First off, iTunes has had a graphical overhaul; Aqua has gone completely, replaced by more utilitarian grey gradients, a more mature and restrained feel. The sidebar has changed too; no longer is everything crammed together into slots, but everything is spaced into sections like Library (for music, movies and so on), Store, Shared, and Playlists. It gives a clearer more open feel, but sadly the album art display beneath remains in the same place and still feels somewhat shoehorned in.

 

Functionality in terms of browsing and searching the libraries of music and movies remains much the same, as does the design of the Store; it’s the content that’s been updated. Games for iPod are now available at £3.99 or $4.99, including the usual-suspect videogame classics (Pac-Man, Tetris), the obligatory ported shareware (Bejewelled, Zuma), and, erm, Texas Hold ‘Em. The games are a mixed bag in terms of quality of gameplay and kind of a battery drain, but it’s a solid idea that’s been carried through fairly well. The price is reasonable (especially considering the extortionate prices charged by networks for mobile phone downloads), and the games are, by and large, fun to play. My own experience with Pac-Man has been an enjoyable one, bar the annoyance of the occasional imprecision of touch control. Movies, too, are a new addition for the iTunes Store, but sadly only offered in VGA format (640x480 resolution). While this is better than the pathetic TV offerings in the past (QVGA for two dollars?!), it’s still too low for it to be a worthwhile competitor to higher quality DVD offerings. Surely, with bandwidth increasing all the time, HD downloads have to be just around the corner? They’d even go nicely with the new ‘iTV’ hardware, especially with the HDMI and component out ports on the back, and the strange omission of a letter from the ‘802.11’ specification Jobs mentioned when he unveiled the device. It’s increasingly likely (thanks to the discovery of pre-n spec network cards in 24 inch iMacs) that the iTV will feature finalized n-spec networking for high speed HD streaming, which would match perfectly with a HD movie store.

 

In terms of brand new, the biggest additions for iTunes this time around involve album art. The first and more minor inclusion is that of automatically retrieving art for songs that don’t have it, something that users have been crying out for since about version 4 at least; it’s fast, retrieves high resolution artwork, and works well, but we should have been using this two versions ago. The second is Coverflow, a way of virtually flicking through your music collection by scrolling visually through your album artwork. This isn’t actually Apple’s tech; they bought it from another company recently, but it’s a cool addition all the same, and makes a change from scrolling down a list of names.

 

iTunes 7 is a solid update to an extremely mature music management application; it’s beautiful, simple to use, and effective. But it feels confused. iTunes used to be all about the music, but with iPod games, movies, and TV shows, it’s lost its direction. Some of that is probably due to its ever-rising popularity on Windows and Apple’s wish to stake yet more of a claim on Windows Media Player’s territory, but they’ve got it all wrong; iTunes isn’t some kind of all singing, all dancing universal application (hell, WMP tries to do that, and look where it’s got to). It’s a music player, first and foremost. No matter how slick the video functionality, it still feels tacked on and unnecessary.

 

Please Apple, make a decision about iTunes. Make it the media centre you seem so desperate for it to become, or let it be a music player again, and take the video back to Quicktime. Slick and successful as it may be, the Movie Store still feels like a case of mistaken identity for iTunes.