AppleTV

I don't see too much point in talking about the iPhone, since that will be everywhere. Yes, innovative. Yes, awesome. Yes, lives up to expectations and beyond. Yes, I will be getting one. Yes, I will probably blog about it later after watching the keynote.

The red-headed step child of the day was AppleTV (formerly iTV). Apple TV puts your iTunes library — movies, TV shows, music, and podcasts plus iPhotos — on your TV. And it all appears in high definition (720p) so you can put on quite a show. Sporting the latest HDMI output along with component out, this baby will hook up to all modern TV's as well as some of the older ones like my 5 year old Sony Wega old-school "tube" TV. It syncs wirelessly to your iTunes library via 802.11 b, g & n, but wireless streaming requires g or n. It has a 40 GB hard drive for storing programming locally so you're not always hogging your home network bandwidth. You can also wire it up via 10/100BASE-T Ethernet.

At $299, it's a pretty good deal to be able to get all that content from your downstairs iMac to your upstairs TV. And in high-definition. It will begin shipping sometime in February.