LIVE BLOG, APPLE MEETING. What the hell, I have a few minutes.

10:01 PT: Jobs looks skinny but by now I just assume it's the yoga. Does he always sound so Eddie Haskellish? I thought his voice was deeper. Maybe I was mixing him up with Larry David.

They're opening a second store in Paris. "A beautiful old building that we restored." But it's their new store in China -- "a 40-foot-high glass cylinder" -- that gets the applause. The Apple Corps understand unity! Also, new store in Covent Garden. Their 300th store.

10:05: More about stores. Lots of people in stores. Lots of lessons taught. Nothing about how much they buy.

10:06: 120 million iOS devices shipped! (iTouch, iPad etc.) 130,000 new activations a day! 6.5 billion apps!

iOS 4.1! Bugs fixed. "All the bugs that we get mails on." HD video over wifi, TV show rentals, Game Center.

Also "High Dynamic Range Photos" standard. What? Tap a button and it "takes 3 photos in rapid succession," with a range of exposure calculated by "some pretty sophisticated algorithms."



Basically, it's an equalization feature.

10:10: Game Center lets you play with friends and "if you don't have any friends they can match you up with some." Laughs from the room full of former and present geeks.

Oh no, gamer stuff ("Project Sword!")! I'm going to just fade away here awhile...

10:15: They played a game and everyone went "woo."

Back to iOS 4.1: Wireless printing. AirTunes becomes AirPlay because it's not just music anymore. Jobs puts Pandora on, and is now multi-tasking -- an exciting new concept for mobile! -- by looking at the Web. Coming in November.

iPods will be the "entree." First more boasting: 275 million sold. It's digital McDonald's!

"Every year we try to improve iPods and this year, we've gone wild."

A new design for every model. Like the Shuffle: "People missed the buttons." So they have some. Plus it's tiny, see? And provides 15 hours of music.

iiPod Nano HAS MULTITOUCH! IT HAS MULTITOUCH EVERYBODY! And it too is very tiny. And has 24 hour battery life. Starts at $149.

10:30: Jobs is talking about how the touch screen turns upside down if you want it to. "Photos look pretty good on it as well." Especially when projected many times over their real size.

Apparently they're doing something similar with the Touch. "Some people call in an iPhone without a phone. It's also an iPhone without a contract." Well, that's a plus. And Touch is not only their most popular mobile, it's also the biggest game player in the world.

The new one is: "More thin," hence "more beautiful." Also the "retina display" and front-facing camera/FaceTime that were the big come-ons for iPhone 4G. And 4 hours of music playback. And now iPhones and Touch communicate with one another. Starts at $229 -- next week. Vrroom!

10:30: New ads. iPod ads emphasize wearability due to size, clip. Touch ads tout gaming, FaceTime.

Oh, and iTunes 10. They've "ditched the CD" from the logo, because no one uses those anymore. Just notes in a circle now. Also, Discovery: "How do you find out about new stuff?" Something better than email? Solution: "Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes." They call it Ping -- "a social network built right into music." Click the Ping button, you see friends, stars, posts, etc. You sign up to follow people and find out what they're listening to, what concerts they're going to. "All the information on the people we follow will be delivered right to us." You can also set up a "Circle of Friends" option whereby you get to exclude the losers from following you. You can look at an artist's photos, post comments on them, etc. Great for kids and bloggers!

Oh God, a personal video message from Lady Gaga to her "beautiful monsters." She sounds weak and stoned. No applause.

In a way it's weird. It seems like a walled garden version of... the whole internet. On the other hand, the interface lets you listen to other iTunes users' music -- which is a previously missing piece that could be big.

10:50: Wait a minute -- Apple TV? Those few people who use it want on-demand -- "Hollywood TV and movies." And HD. And lower prices. "They don't want a computer on their TVs. They have computers." They don't like syncing. They don't like noisy mechanisms. Hard for computer people to understand, says Jobs -- but "easy for consumers to understand."

Solution: AppleTV 2nd Gen. And it, too, is mini. ("I can hold it in my hand.") Basically it's like TiVo only smaller, and it has WiFi and streaming. There are no longer any purchases -- you rent your shows -- and thus, no storage issues. But even if you rent the same content several times, Jobs claims, it's still cheaper than buying.

You rent from iTunes. First run rental movies, $4.99. (And you can see the Tomatometer!) TV shows, 99 cents. (ABC and FOX are the partners, and they think the other producers will "see the light" soon.) And you can stream off your computer. And get Netflix. Jobs keeps saying "simple," which they must have perceived was the problem with AppleTV. (And "tiny little box," because that's today's theme.) UPDATE: $99!

And... that was an hour. I promised myself I'd stop then. In sum: Everything is smaller and touch-ier, and that's it -- except that, thanks to Ping, you can listen to other people's iTunes from home, which -- since iTunes is so cheap -- will probably lead to a buttload of new iTunes sales.

UPDATE. Gwyneth Paltrow's husband performs. I take it all back: Apple sucks.

UPDATE 2: Sorry, I just had to replay these two comments from the Endgadget thread on Ping: "Apple just created a social network which is only available to Apple customers. Thank fuck for that." "Yes thank fuck indeed. I like to think of it as more of a douchebag hipster quarantine."

UPDATE 3: Thanks, comrades, for spelling tips. I haven't done this liveblog thing since I was blogging regular at the Voice. So much multitasking! No wonder I have a twitch.