We love September 9th? Why? Because 2 years in a row Apple has chosen September 9th as the official date for new iPod releases! This year is shaping up to be no exception. Tomorrow at 1pm EST/10am PST Steve Jobs will host the special event for the media. There are plenty of rumors this year to be excited about, so let’s run through the list:

The Beatles coming to iTunes (finally!)

Tonight Yoko Ono leaked news that the entire Beatles catalog would be released to iTunes, possibly as early as tomorrow, to coincide with the international release of The Beatles edition of the popular “Rock Band” video game.

New iPods with cameras and increased storage

The iPod Touch is rumored to be getting an upgrade that includes a camera, similar to the iPhones. Will the iPod Nanos and iPod Classics also receive the upgrade? Our sources tell us they will.

Also, expect the entire iPod line to get a capacity upgrade. 60 GB iPod Touch’s anyone?!

iTunes Pre-cut Ringtones

Do you hate the fact that you have to purchase a song and then pay another 99 cents so you can cut it up into a ringtone? Tomorrow Apple is rumored to be announcing pre-cut ringtones. Will this make the labels as happy as it will users?

iTunes 9

iTunes is due for an upgrade. Why wasn’t it just included with Snow Leopard? Strong chance of this happening.

“The whole of the Beatles back catalogue will be made available to buy on iTunes, Yoko Ono has told Sky News.”

The article is now showing a blank page on the site but was cached by Google for a short amount of time. The cache has now mysteriously disappeared from Google as well, in record time.

The Beatles catalog has been rumored to be coming to iTunes for a while but was written off recently with little indication or leakage of any information on the deal. The September 9th date is significant because it is also the international release date of The Beatles highly anticipated “Rock Band” video game.

Keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned for full details after Apple’s September 9th event.

During its quarterly earnings call today, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer focused a lot of attention on what the company is now calling its “pocket products.” That is, the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPod. You’ll notice that Apple has taken to separating out the iPod touch from the rest of the iPod line. And that makes sense, given it shares many more similarities with the iPhone. But it’s also for another reason: The iPod, as we know it, is dying.

Of the three pocket products, two saw huge year-over-year growth this quarter, one did not. While iPhone sales grew a massive 626% year-over-year, iPod touch sales actually grew just about 130% too. And while Apple may consider the iPod touch outside of the iPod line, for financial purposes, it’s still counted with them. So when you hear that overall the iPod family saw a 7% decline year over year, you know that the actual iPod numbers minus the iPod touch, must not be very good at all.

And while Apple wouldn’t specifically give those numbers, Oppenheimer did note that the iPhone and iPod touch are very much “cannibalizing” the stand-alone MP3 iPod market. Apple still has over 70% of the MP3 player market, but it’s probably safe to assume that the overall pie which Apple has 70% of, is going to start shrinking soon (if it hasn’t already), at least in the U.S. The way Oppenheimer spoke today about what he calls the “traditional mp3 players” was almost like a eulogy.

And for good reason. I’d be fairly surprised if Apple updates its hard-drive based iPod classic ever again. It will likely continue to sell it for a while, and may even do something with the price. But the thought of Apple devoting any time to reworking this dinosaur at this point, seems pointless.

We now carry an iPhone for our music, but there are still things that we actually prefer about the iPod Classic, like, the price point, the storage capacity, the durability, and more. Worrying about breaking you $700 32GB iPhone sucks. It makes using an iPhone for potentially dangerous things, like snowboarding or bmxing, extremely risky, no pun intended.

We just don’t see the iPod getting anything but better over the next 10 years, even if it does evolve a little bit!

Is this happening to anyone else from their local Apple retail store? Has anyone found any other iPhone hacking related sites that are banned by Apple?

Initial impressions

The iPhone is extremely sexy, elegant and incredibly easy to use as a phone and an iPod. The screen is incredibly sharp and high res for any phone, iPod or handheld device. The glass didn’t smudge like we thought it would either. The iPhone just feels great in your hand!

The iPod

Being that we’re huge iPod addicts the iPod was the first thing we checked out while using the iPhone. The iPod on the iPhone is amazing. In fact, we’d say that it’s the best iPod yet. We love the cover flow navigation and extra large album art, as well as being able to select a group of letters to automatically scroll to. For example, if your looking for an artist who’s name starts with a “J” you can just touch the area on the right side of the screen containing the letters IJKL and you’ll be very close to the artist your looking for. This is something the current iPods will never be able to do, even though Apple has made things fairly easy by displaying the letters as you scroll down with the iPod’s touchpad.

Watching videos from iTunes is much nicer on the iPhone than on any iPod, especially if the video is in widescreen format.

Unfortunately the iPhones built in speakers aren’t very loud, so don’t expect your iPhone to be a replacement for headphones or external speakers.

The Phone

The iPhone actually turned out to be a great phone! Go figure. The dialing interface is extremely easy to use and has some great features. Our favorite was the conference call feature, which is awesome and very easy to use. Adding contact is easy to use and associating photos with contacts is almost too easy.

Visual voicemail is amazing! We never want to have to dial into a voicemail system again.

As we said with the iPod feature on the iPhone, the speaker on the iPhone isn’t very loud, so we we’re a little disappointed with it while in speakerphone mode. Also, we weren’t able to figure out how to delete a single entry from your missed call or recent call list. There’s an option to clear everything but we we didn’t want to delete everything, just one number. Come on, Apple. This is basic stuff.

Oh, and the iPhone ringtones are all pretty boring.

Safari

Apple boasts that Safari is the first real browser ever on a mobile phone. It really is a nice to have an almost full-featured web browser on the iPhone. However it’s still not what we consider a full-featured web browser since it doesn’t support Java or Flash. So don’t think that you can go to YouTube.com in Safari and watch YouTube videos because it won’t work. That’s what the YouTube application is for. It is nice having javascript support though.

Apple made it easy to zoom in and move around web sites with your fingertips on the iPhone. Most web pages with a lot of text are hard to read or click links in portrait mode so we mostly used landscape mode. The good news is that when you do need to zoom in on a web page everything comes up very clear and crisp. We did notice a few times when the iPhone didn’t want to rotate the screen from portrait to landscape mode and sometimes we thought the screen wasn’t going to rotate but it just took a few seconds. It also turned out to be a littler easier for us to type using the on screen keyboard while in landscape mode, since the keys appear to be a little bigger and further apart, resulting in fewer mistakes. The on screen keyboard features a “.com” button when using Safari which helped us save a lot of time when typing URL’s since we still weren’t used to the keyboard.

Safari features a built in search field for easily searching Google or Yahoo. I wonder how Microsoft feels about being left out?

SMS Text Messaging

The iPhone’s SMS app is very simple. The iPhone keeps track of conversations with your contacts in an iChat like interface, logging the whole conversation from start to finish, which is nice. We know it’s cheesy but even the animation showing you that your text message is being sent is slick. It’s nicer than the 5 second pause my Blackberry gives me.

Writing an email or a text message are the most typing intensive applications on the iPhone so we think now would be a good time to go into further detail on the on-screen keyboard.

The keyboard feels a little cramped to us, but that may be because we’re long time Blackberry users. It was very hard for us to jump right into using two thumbs on the iPhone. We found ourselves having to pluck away with one finger. After a few hours of use we were much more confident with using two thumbs on the iPhone keyboard but still made mistakes, bringing me to my next point – typing correction. We’re not sure what the big deal with the typing correction is, because we didn’t really find it to be very helpful, since we still made plenty of mistakes at first.

EDGE & WiFi

Lot’s of people complained about AT&T’s EDGE network in the iPhone reviews we read, but for us EDGE seemed pretty snappy. It’s nowhere near as fast as EVDO or WiFi, but it seemed to work fine for us for casual web browsing and YouTube videos.

We found that being able to use WiFi on the iPhone was one of its best features. WiFi was extremely was to setup and ran every fast. As Borat would say… “Very nice!”

YouTube

The iPhone’s YouTube app is one of the best things about the iPhone. The interface is very much like the Apple TV interface and videos looked really good on the high res screen! The videos even seemed to load fairly quickly over EDGE. The “special codec” YouTube is using for the iPhone videos turned out to be nice. We’d like to know how small the file sizes are compared to regular YouTube videos.

Photos

The iPhone’s photo app is, for lack of a better word, great. Dragging and zooming in on things with the iPhone’s touchscreen seems to be the most useful with this photo app. Its way to much fun to zoom in and move around photos. From within the photo app it’s also very easy to assign photos to contacts.

Google Maps

Google Maps is a little less exciting to us since the iPhone doesn’t have GPS to help navigate you or tell you where you are currently. The interface Apple put together on top of Google’s API is very sleek though. Google Maps did seem a little slower over EDGE if you’re constantly zooming in and out or dragging around a map.

Weather, Calculator & Stocks

The weather application confused the heck out of us at first because we didn’t know how to view the weather reports in other cities we setup. After a minute or two of complaining we figured out you just scroll to the side to scroll through weather reports for the configured cities.

The calculator app was extremely simple to use with it’s large on screen buttons.

If you’ve used the stock widget that comes with OS X before, then you know all there is to know about this application. It’s as simple as can be.

The Camera

We tried to get photos from the iPhone to our email but we didn’t want our email stored on a random display model iPhone. But the photos we took with the iPhone’s built in camera looked better than any other camera phone we’ve used in the past. Did we mention that it has a really cool James Bondish animation when you snap a photo?

Coolest Feature

In the phone application you can see more city and state information on the numbers you called and the numbers that called you. If you’ve ever gotten a call from a number that you didn’t recognize, this could be a big help! We just wish they would add this information on the screen while the call is coming in, instead of making you look it up in your call logs.

Worst Feature

It’s easy to screw up when using the keyboard at first. Typing using two thumbs takes confidence and a few hours or days of use to get comfortable with.

We want to emphasize that this still isn’t terrible, it just takes some time to get used to!

Closing remarks

After using the iPhone for upwards of two hours we feel like the iPhone lives up to the hype even with the high $499 and $599 price tags. Every aspect of the iPhone is incredibly easy to use and is heavily focused on having a rich multimedia experience, which is something not a lot of phones have ever focused on up until this point.

If your looking for more information on the iPhone or to see the iPhone in action check out Apple’s site at http://www.apple.com/iphone

Below are the GoPhone pricing plans for the iPhones.

Via TUAW.com

After placing or receiving a call on the iPhone you can go into the phone applications recent calls menu and select an individual call and be brought to a menu like the one seen below.

Notice anything interesting? Directly underneath the phone number there’s a line giving you the area where the phone number’s located! In this example, the phone number displayed is a Nextel cell phone from the Ventura, CA area, and the iPhone came back with the number being from the “Northern Los Angeles Area.” We also did a few other tests and the iPhone was extremely accurate with cell phone and landline numbers from around the New York Metro area.

It’s a shame that the iPhone doesn’t automatically display this information on incoming calls. We’re sure we’re not the only ones who get calls from numbers in area codes that we’re not familiar with. The iPhones super Caller ID feature could be a big help to a lot of people and a major selling point of the phone for many consumers. Alltel recently introduced a similar enhanced Caller ID service, called City ID, available only on certain handsets with an additional monthly fee. Our guess is that the iPhone has a built in database for this super Caller ID function, because it wouldn’t make sense to constantly retrieve this information over EDGE. So why hasn’t Apple boasted about this super Caller ID feature anywhere yet? We love it.

We were surprised at the amount of people that decided to show up! From what we heard the first ten or fifteen people in line had been there camped out all day, which was pretty apparent due to the fold up camping chairs around their shoulders. There were two or three camera crews and four or five police officers parked out front as well. We’re the police really needed to keeping the angry mob in Albany from tearing down the doors at the Apple store two minutes early and all running out with free iPhones? No, because none of that happened. See for yourself in the video we took below.

Apple employees opened the doors at 6pm sharp and let in the first 20 or so people to buy their iPhones. Everything went quietly and smoothly as the huge line started to die down and we made our way into the Apple store to demo the glorious iPhone. We got to play around with the iPhone for about 2 hours, giving us plenty of time to play with each application and feature. Check back in a few hours as we write up our initial impressions of the iPhone!