Apple’s just released the newest version of its top-ranked mobile operating system iOS. Version 5 of iOS promises to contain a lot of goodies that will really compel Apple mobile devices to upgrade. If you’re still on the fence about it, here are some of the features you will see with iOS 5.

<h5>iCloud</h5>

Apple enters the cloud computing bandwagon with the integration of iCloud to iOS 5. This is one of the two top draws of iOS 5 and a service that Apple is investing on heavily. Taken for what it is, iCloud will allow you to save your different files and even apps on the cloud. You can then synchronize that data across all of your iOS 5 enabled devices. But more than synchronization, the iCloud service also offers you an additional level of protection against data loss. iCloud even makes syncing more convenient because all the data is located at one place and you an access it wherever you are. The iCloud service offers iOS capable device owners free 5 gigabytes of data which is sufficient for the average user, but you can choose to upgrade that capacity by buying a yearly subscription.

<h5>Siri</h5>

A lot of buzz surrounded Siri, or iAssistant as it was first refered to in the days leading to the iPhone 4s unveiling. Siri is voice navigation and control brought to the next level. Apple’s innovations in developing a voice assistant is nothing short of revolutionary. You can now control a lot of operations on your iPhone 4S using natural syntax. Gone are the days of talking like a stuttering robot in the hope that the device you’re talking to will get at least 70 percent of what you’re saying correctly. Talking to your phone using Siri can be quite unnerving at times because of the extremely high accuracy level. Unfortunately, Siri will only be activated on the iPhone 4S. Even though iOS 5 will be an update to the iPhone 3GS and 4, it won’t get the Siri feature. That’s one thing to consider if you’ll want to jump to 4S.

<h5>Updates untethered</h5>

One of the most requested features for Apple’s iOS is the ability to update a device without having to plug it into a computer. Apple has finally included this feature in iOS 5. You can now update your Apple device over the air (WiFi or 3G). The delta updates also mean that the file sizes are significantly smaller. Users will be notified with a badge if there are any new updates.

<h5>iMessage</h5>

A messaging app has been included in iOS 5. Apple device owners can now send instant messages to other device owners. The messaging goes through the app and nothing else. This is a great way of communicating with friends and doing it absolutely free, and free is always good.

Version 4.3.3 exists solely to change the way iOS keeps your location data. Essentially, it erases said data from your i-Device and your computer both.

Apple says that the size of the location-data cache is reduced by this update, along with eliminating backups of the cache entirely from your computer’s iTunes software. Also, the cache can be deleted in its entirety if you turn “Location Services” off on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad.

If you want to turn off Location Services, here’s what to do:

1. Click on the “Settings” icon in the lower right corner of your iPhone or iPad.
2. Select the “Location Services” tab.
3. Here you’ll find a list of all apps on your device currently using Location tracking. You can either go through the list and deselect the ones you want to stop doing this, or you can turn off Location tracking across-the-board by switching it all off at the top of the list.

That’s it. Hopefully everyone can take some cleansing breaths and move on, now.

Following the iPhone’s launch on Verizon is news that AT&T is now considering mobile Hotspot support and the feature would be added to iOS 4.3. However, it’s unknown if Mobile Hotspot support will make its way to the iPad.

Speaking of the iPad, the ringer button will once again control screen orientation lock. Apple changed the ringer button’s function to mute the device much to the outrage of users. IOS 4.3 will revert the changes Apple made. To mute the device, you’ll have to hold down the lower volume button.

New touch gestures are coming to the iPad for App switching. 9to5Mac received a note on the functionality in iOS 4.3:

Test Multi-Touch Gestures for iPad
This beta release contains a preview of new Multi-Touch gestures for iPad. You can use four or five fingers to pinch to the Home Screen; swipe up to reveal the multitasking bar; and swipe left or right between apps. We are providing this preview before releasing them to the public to understand how these gestures work with your apps. Test them and give us your feedback on the Apple Developer Forums.

Video Of The New Touch Gestures

Jason Snell of Macworld has a proposed fix:

Once you’ve passed that special minute and your iPhone has shot off its virtual confetti cannon, the bug occurs: one-time alarms set for 12:01 a.m., for example, won’t go off. (I was able to set a recurring event for every Saturday at 12:03 a.m., and that one went off.)

Skype has updated its iOS App to support video calling to any Skype client on any OS – a far wider reach of devices than those supported by Apple’s FaceTime. The update requires iOS 4.0 and a device with a video camera (4th generation iPod Touch and iPhone). For those iOS devices without a video camera, you can receive a live video feed of your participant.

Besides the massive number of supported of devices, Skype has another feature that sets it apart from FaceTime: 3G support. FaceTime on the iPhone is limited to a WiFi connection but Skype supports 3G and Wifi connections for video calls.

You can download Skype from the App Store

The iPhone Dev Team announced a beta version of its untethered Jailbreak but it isn’t for the faint of heart. This beta is only available for the Mac and since there are bugs to be worked out, things can go wrong fast. There are issues such as Bluetooth being disabled for some. Additionally, if you need to unlock your iPhone using ultrasn0w, you’ll need to wait for the final version.

For the adventurous, iPhone FAQ has a tutorial on how to go about the Jailbreaking process.

Analyst Ashok Kumar believes Apple will be bringing a pair of ARM A9 Cores to the next generation of iOS devices.

“Apple is on track to refresh the iPad by March and iPhone by late summer. A key component upgrade across these platforms will be a dual-core processor featuring a pair of 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 cores,”

Is Apple developing a successor to the A4 (a fusion of an ARM A9 core and GPU) that will pack double the cores? Only time will tell what silicon Apple’s working on thanks to its purchase of PA Semi.

I have a feeling the next iteration of iOS devices is where we’ll start to see Apple flex some more custom silicon as it starts to apply PA Semi’s work.

The $1.99 App was removed from the App Store without any explanation although many thought the sensitive nature of the information being shared likely prompted Apple to take action. While many will be quick to cry censorship, Apple could have removed the App for another reason: raising money for a charity.

Apple states that collecting money for charity from iOS App sales is not allowed. The developer behind the unofficial WikiLeaks App was donating half of the profit to WikiLeaks.

Apple has made the tablet and the smartphone intimate. It’s personal, touchable and everywhere you are — a revolution years in the making — here’s how it happened.

Touch computing was at the forefront of futuristic concepts for computers and has appeared in many kinds of gadgets over the last decade. It wasn’t until the iPhone’s debut in early 2007 that touch screens became wide spread in mobile devices. Apple’s approach to bringing the touch computing to a wide audience isn’t accident; Apple made the tablet intimate.

You Want To Touch iOS

As humans, we interact by touching which creates a bond between people close to us. Touch came to the computing world but it wasn’t as refined as it was today and was tacked on as an additional layer of interaction. Apple made touch the only method of interaction and navigation on the iPhone and iPad but made the user interface finger friendly. Navigational elements and buttons were front and center. This was an interface designed for fingers and not cursors. The iPhone and collectively all iOS devices beat out touch layers put on desktop OSs.

iOS Focuses On Your Content

Apple took the experience of how we interact with media and made it personal through a touch interface. While we could thumb through photos and hold documents, we couldn’t interact with the web, our music and videos on such an intimate scale even with touch interfaces pre-iPhone. Apple made content king on all iOS devices which coupled with one of the most personal means of human interaction has now made the tablet form factor and the smartphone intimate.

iOS Is Everywhere You Are

Because the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad are so personal and intimate, we want to take them everywhere. The iPhone and the iPod Touch have the advantage of being extremely portable as it can fit in your pocket. But have you noticed it’s often the first thing you go to in the morning? Checking email or Facebook? The focus is on content. Why is it the first thing you grab in the morning? It’s personal, you’re touching things you care about even if they’re visualized 1′s and 0′s. The iPad, while not pocketable, does make it more appealing than the most ultraportable notebook if you are focusing on mobility.

The entire family of iOS devices thrive on touch interfaces and adapt well to any screen size. We as humans love touching things, especially things we care about like photos, music and the web.

Google officially announced that the desktop version of Google Docs is now iPad friendly. Previously, editing documents and spreadsheets wasn’t available on iOS devices. Google made progress by announcing a revamped mobile version but now the full desktop version is compatible with Safari on the iPad.

“The new mobile editor is fast and lightweight, but sometimes you want to make more style edits like changing a font, or center aligning a paragraph. If you’re on an iPad, you can do that by visiting the Desktop version of the document editor.”

However, it’s important to note that not all the desktop features of Google are usable on the iPad. It’s still progress on Google’s part and having expanded access to Google Docs on the iPad is still better than nothing.

Better RAM Management — Apps Faster Over Beta Versions

A large concern iOS users have with every new major release is how their iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch will handle it. IOS 4.0 caused problems for iPhone 3G owners as they were plagued with slow launching Apps which  restarts only solved some of the time. These issues can be attributed to the lack of RAM in the iPhone 3G —128 MB compared to the 256MB available in the iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone 3GS.

Apple has kept the complaints of iPhone 3G users in mind as iOS 4.X builds have continually focused on better RAM optimization. The Italian site IPad Device put together a breakdown of how Apple has changed RAM allocation between some of its iOS Apps.

Safari Improvements — HTML 5 Updates & Hardware APIs

Safari has also been updated to take advantage of more HTML5 features and adds support for the Gyroscope and Accelerometer according to Mobile Web Programming via The iPhone Blog.

An independent test by Mobile Web Programming of Safari’s new features  includes:

Accelerometer & Gyroscope support through the DeviceOrientation API
WebSockets API from HTML5
Updated HTML 5 Form Support
Partial XHR-2 Support
New JavaScript data types
New DOM events
Enhanced SVG and Canvas support

If you are a web developer I highly encourage you read Mobile Web Development’s complete breakdown of Safari’s newest features.

id Software has released the extremely interactive and gory first-person shooter RAGE for all iOS devices. The game is a scaled down version of the forthcoming Mac/PC release but packs a visual punch.

RAGE, priced at an extremely affordable $0.99 for the Standard Definition version of the game and only $1.99 for the High Def version is sure to be game of the year for iOS. This rails-shooter is available for any iOS device from the iPod Touch to the iPad. What sets this game apart: an excellent price, beautiful graphics (if accurately rendered mutant mutilation is up your alley) and of course, excellent iOS controls

John Carmack of id Software talked to TUAW about the game:

“All of the user interface is at twice the resolution, the animated characters are at twice the precision, and the world textures are at twice the feedback bias, which doesn’t quite equate to twice the pixel density, but it’s almost twice the data that goes in there.”

Carmack also talked about a previously unmentioned feature in RAGE: playing the game on a TV. While the game doesn’t redraw the controls for playing it on a TV or support an iPod Touch/iPhone as a second controller, the feature is being refined.

AirPrint is one of the major selling points of iOS 4.2, which is supposedly coming to iPhone, iPod Touch, and most importantly, is bringing iOS 4 capabilities to iPad, any day now. But now word is spreading that only a specific set of printers by HP will be able to use AirPrint. Like, at all.

The idea behind AirPrint is, as it sounds, to finally make a longtime wish of iOS users possible: printing. Steve Jobs introduced AirPrint at a recent keynote, where he claimed it would allow all of Apple’s mobile devices to easily print to any printer that’s shared over a network. That’s any printer, regardless of make, model, toner cartridges, paper, etc. No drivers, no software to install, no muss, no fuss.

Apparently either Steve was lying, or it was a lot harder to pull off than Apple expected it to be. Rumors are circulating that suggest that instability and compatibility issues have plagued AirPrint to the point that it’s currently impossible via shared network printers. So Steve is faced with a tough decision: should he allow iOS 4.2 to finally be released as is, without a fully functional AirPrint, or should he delay this long-awaited upgrade yet again — potentially angering iPad users who have been waiting for it the longest?

Right now, the only printers that work with AirPrint are HP’s “ePrint” series.

If you had asked me two months ago what three things I could count on to be 100% reliable, I would’ve said death, taxes, and the iPod Touch is going to get FaceTime. Apple has been making a big push for the technology to take off since the iPhone 4 came out this summer, and since we all knew the iPod Touch would shortly be getting a refresh, it was a gimme. The big question in my mind was whether or not any other iPods would get the technology, and it looks like on that end, it just didn’t happen. I think from here on out, we’ll see the Nano continue to get smaller, and it may eventually replace the Shuffle entirely.

When it comes to certain truths, I think I can say with confidence that next to get FaceTime will be the iPad. People complained about the iPad not having the technology to begin with, so expect the iPad 2 to come with FaceTime and dual cameras. The only other thing I see coming before that is FaceTime on OSX, which would essentially be a rebadge of iChat.

FaceTime is catching up. Let’s see what’s next.

It’s July 9th, but it’s just a few weeks from the annual September Apple iPod event, when all the new goodies are announced to the world. So what’s the big announcement this year? According to CNet, a FaceTime-capable iPod Touch. Hmm … Sounds familiar.

Rob Hennessy, the audio and telecom buyer for U.K. retail giant John Lewis, said this week at a company event focused on the holiday-shopping season that the updated iPod Touch will be aimed at teens and kids.

Several U.K. tech blogs reported Hennessy as saying that the next iPod Touch will mimic the iPhone 4 by including a 5-megapixel camera, a flash, HD video recording, and a gyroscope. He also reportedly said that new iPod Touch will include FaceTime, Apple’s new video-calling feature.

A John Lewis spokeswoman confirmed to CNET on Thursday that Hennessy made the remarks, though she added that Hennessy was “speculating” about the device. The spokeswoman added that Apple has not contacted John Lewis directly or discussed any new version of the device.

Translation: This is all speculation and conjecture, and we have no hard facts. to back this up.

That doesn’t mean that it’s not happening, however. The iPod Touch is an iPhone minus the cell phone portion. That means there’s enough room for a front and rear facing camera, no sweat. Plus there’s already Wi-Fi in the thing, so that’s not an issue either. Really, the cameras are the only thing stopping it from becoming a FaceTime machine.

Guess we’ll find out in September.

As the hot pink haired Japanese game show host says on the “South Park FREE” application: “Here we make young greedy contestants on roller skates put their life in danger for petty sums of money!”

The most famous four South Park inhabitants, Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny, arrive on the television obstacle course in order to help earn some cold cash…in Yen. The catch is that the show is meant to humiliate and maim its contestants along the way toward earning a meager winning.

The “South Park FREE” App uses the actual South Park cartoon’s voices and images, as the kids are strapped to wayward skates and placed on what looks like a giant and dangerous board game. Disgusting, suicidal and sumo wrestler based traps are placed around the board that leads to the ultimate prize: 10,000 Yen (which the kids do not realize is not a lot of money…yet).

The controls are simple: tilt the iPhone and move Cartman to the side that is turned, while pressing on the screen causes the big boned elementary school student from Colorado to jump on the glowing Japanese board.

Playing the “South Park FREE” App one would never know that they were not in the show, so get it here[iTunes link]! The voices, backgrounds and kick ass Kenny deaths make the game ridiculously authentic, especially for a free iPhone offer. Enjoy keeping the kids alive for as long as you can!

IMPULSIVE Review Grade: A+

The unique quality to the 2010 World Cup has been the droning of a thousand swarms of bees that any soccer fan can hear vibrating their television and surround sound speakers. The cause of the noise is not a killer bee invasion, but rather the South Africa age-old football camaraderie of the Vuvuzela. The Vuvuzela is a long plastic horn that South Africans invoke to cheer on their favorite football teams.

The free “Vuvuzela 2010” App allows for anyone with an iPhone, or iPod Touch, to either appear zealous in watching the great Ivory Coast games, or just plain annoying as the extremely authentic sounding application literally makes the device spit out the loud droning bee swarm sound. Disturb friends and family alike with a portable Vuvuzela occasionally blasting fun that will echo in living rooms and bars, like a form of water torture.

The “Vuvuzela 2010” App has been created for the die-hard football fans in mind. There are a number of color combinations to choose from before sounding the horn, and they represent either the team or the goalkeepers’ colors. Choose the appearance of the Vuvuzela, just like the fans in South Africa and let the sound fly!

IMPULSIVE Review Grade: A

It’s no secret that Apple is huge in the education sector. They’ve had an education section of the Apple store for years now. I remember the Apple store in my school’s MU back before OSX made its debut, back when I doubted I’d ever purchase a Mac. How things change yet stay the same – or something like that.

I got an e-mail yesterday and it made me wish I was signing up for classes again. It’s Apple’s yearly Back to School sale, and it goes like this, per the site:

If you’re a college student or a faculty or staff member at any grade level and you buy a new Mac with Apple education pricing from May 25 through September 7, 2010, you can get a free 8GB iPod touch.* No wonder they call these the best years of your life.

As if all that wasn’t enough, prices on Macs for students offer some decent savings. Get a MacBook for $949, a MacBook Pro starting at $1099, or any other model you want. It’s not a ton of cash, but if you’re a student, every penny counts.

Anyone signing up for these deals? I would if I could — I’ve got my eye on a Mac Mini for the living room.

Over the course of the past month or so, Vietnamese site Tinhte has been posting up pics of new Apple products on a regular basis. First it was the 4th-Gen iPhone, then the 13-inch MacBook update, and the latest here is the iPod Touch. Thanks to the world of Google Translate, I can provide this quote:

IPod Touch with a camera behind. Initial view that this looks identical to the iPod Touch 3rd generation and iPod Touch is similar to the camera posted for sale on each eBay.IPod Touch In this table we also saw a record specifications behind machine, in which every word 64G (perhaps symbolizing 64GB capacity of the machine). Connect your computer, be Reported as running iPhone OS 3.1 machine. Do not know if Apple has introduced a machine like this in the coming WWDC 2010 or not, but let’s glance see how tiny it offline:

I feel like I’m living in the future. Now I just need a robot maid and I’m good to go.

It wouldn’t be particularly shocking to me if the new iPod Touch had a camera. In fact, I anticipate it’ll have a camera and a huge size, over 100GB. I don’t think that’s going out on too big a ledge either, considering how popular the device everyone calls the iTouch has become.I don’t expect this to be here for WWDC though. Instead, I think it’ll come out in September at the annual iPod event.

Look out! Wallets will be getting lighter by the minute due to the ease of access and the convenience of this excellent and effective “Amazon Mobile” App.

The Amazon.com homepage has been shrunken to the iPhone’s screen flawlessly, and the thumb of the user can now realize the intuitive interface and the hosts of books, movies and near infinite other goods.

All of the well-known Amazon.com features are here, including the 1-click buy option, the Amazon user accounts, existing carts, wishlists, payment and shipping options and even the customers’ previous order history. All of Amazon’s great shopping tools are here, so that a user can easily compare prices of books, or read reviews to see if the comedic “Religulous” DVD is worth buying (and it is).

Exclusive to the “Amazon Mobile” App is a new experimental function called Amazon Remembers. With this an owner of an iPhone or iPod Touch can take pictures of things that the mobile consumer might want to buy or find out about. Amazon stores these things for you and if it is a product the “Amazon Mobile” application searches the web to find one similar; when Amazon finds an interesting product it will even email the user to let them know it is available alongside the photo that was taken.

If for nothing else, Amazon.com has proven a great source of information to find out about curious books and movies, and the customer reviews can be very helpful.

IMPULSIVE Review Grade: A

Placing glass and plastic in the old Kirby can outside one’s door is simple, and it’s only as much work as putting out the trash. Unfortunately, some people do not have a state-given recycling can, and others in the U.S. do not have a place where empty water bottles can be thrown away in a safe and responsible manner. What does one do?

Download the “iRecycle” App and instantly have access and information to the closest and most effortless places to recycle things. Lets face it, human beings on this planet, at least in western society, are fairly lazy. If there were no conveniences to recycling too many people would shy away from the practice.

Open up the “iRecycle” application and the practice of recycling can easily become habit, because the App makes recycling ridiculously simple. Just begin to type into the Google-like search bar, with auto-complete so that one does not even have to finish typing the whole word in most cases, and be amazed at the hundreds of thousands of recycling and disposal locales that are nearby.

The App uses the recycler’s location to determine what places are closest to the person wielding the iPhone, and then the myriad nearby locations that accept used printer ink, motor oil and much more show up. Many of the places are ones that the consumers will already be familiar with as many stores such as Best Buy and Staples accept ink cartridges, or refill them, and many auto stores take oil.

IMPULSIVE Review Grade: A+

I was at my old job when I first noticed it. The guy across the desk from me came into the office, all excited, carrying an Apple bag.

“What’d you get?” I asked.

“A new iTouch,” he said.

“A what?”

“An iTouch. You know, the iPhone looking iPod,” he says.

“You mean the iPod Touch?”

“No, the iTouch.”

That’s when I went and got my shovel and beat him into a small puddle.

OK, so that last part didn’t happen. But whenever I hear people talking about the iPod Touch, it’s almost always referred to as an iTouch. Somewhere in their heads, the “pod” gets filtered out of the equation. I spent some time thinking about why this is, and I can only come up with one conclusion: People are stupid.

Alright, so that’s not the only thing I came up with. Lots of people are used to Apple using one-word descriptors for their products. See: iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, etc. Throw a modifier in there, and everybody goes wonky. But for some reason, this problem never comes up with other Apple products with multiple words in the title. Ever heard someone say they want an iShuffle? An iNano? No, of course you don’t. So why just the iPod Touch? I think it’s because of its similarity to the iPhone, and the fact that there are so many variations of the iPod right now that it can get confusing. That, and people are stupid.

Honestly, I’ve tried working this through, but that’s all I can figure out. Maybe there’s some other great conclusion that someone else has, but for me, that’s it. I’m tapped out. But it makes me physically angry to hear the product referred to that way be seemingly everybody. I swear the next time I hear it, I’m going to get a fungo bat and start swinging.

Mental note: don’t stop by the old office anytime soon.

The “Brain Trainer” application has been constructed by personnel at top universities, including Stanford, UCSF and Berkeley, to quite simply put: challenge the brain to improve the memory, mood, problem solving skills and ability to think quickly!

The “Brain Trainer” App provides seven games to pass the time with, in a remarkably productive manner. Fun sounds and intuitive presentations on the touchscreen create engaging situations, and even something as simple as matching shapes is put together to be challenging and addictive.

Upon opening the App the user must sign up with Luminosity.com, one of the world’s leading suppliers of games that intend to improve brain functions, and the scores can be shared with Facebook if the player wants. It is free to sign up and free to download the “Brain Trainer” App, which is Luminosity’s giant mobile release of their programs.

One of the games revolves around a flock of birds that fly in ever-changing formations, and the game player must focus on the center bird and report which direction alone that one is flying as time ticks away. The game proves more difficult and exciting than one would ever imagine.

The “Brain Trainer” application follows each brain function and shows the user an easy to read status bar, and the App carefully instructs the player when to stop and pick up the quick games the next day to show improvement.

IMPULSIVE Review Grade: A

And then there are the apps. I’ve posted before about one of the cooking apps I use, and here’s one that I love even more: AllRecipes.com’s Dinner Spinner Pro.

Yes, it’s a cutesy name, but once you try this app you’ll see how apt it is. Don’t know what to prepare for dinner? The “spinner” lets you select a course type (e.g. Dessert, Main Dish, etc.), ingredients you already have (or feel like having), as well as how long the dish will take to make. Home cooks across the world, rejoice! You can search through AllRecipes.com’s massive recipe database, and read ratings and reviews from other cooks. Dinner Spinner is $2.99 at the App Store.

Of course, if you’re using your iPhone or iPod Touch heavily in the kitchen, you’ll want to protect it with a good, waterproof case. I myself am partial to this one:

The Rugged, Water-Resistant, Crushproof Case by OtterBox is $49.95- but, of course, the peace of mind it gives me is priceless.

Do you use your iPod Touch or iPhone in the kitchen?

Way back in November, I did a post about iPods and Your Car, where I discussed some of the options out there for iPod integration into your car or truck. At that point, I figured I had seen the end of iPod integration into the vehicle. Then today, I saw something on TV which made me think about it a little bit differently.

Chop Cut Rebuild is a show on the Speed Network, where they take a few different cars and build them from projects into full show vehicles over the course of a season. Today I watched one of the final episodes on their ’40 Mercury build, where they finished up the build and installed the stereo. I can’t find the full episode online, but if you check out this clip (particularly at the 0:58 mark) you’ll see the stereo they installed.

Most cars use a head unit; something that has a CD player, FM stereo, navigation, or even a DVD player. In this car, there was an iPod Touch. That’s it.

Technically, this blew me away. I started thinking about how a traditional head unit works, how it gets power, turns on amplifiers and gets sound to the speakers. There are usually separate channels for the front and rear speakers, and sometimes an output for the subwoofers. Using an iPod meant that you wouldn’t get a traditional surround sound with front and rear channels, but you would get stereo from side to side, even if you used a headset adapter. The only thing you’d have to wire would be a way to turn on the amplifier, but you could do that with a relay from the ignition.

This concept is going to be huge among classic car and truck owners. That’s because most older cars can’t fit modern stereos, so they require some cutting to the factory dashboard. That’s a big no-no among hardcore enthusiasts, so most of them install the stereo in the glove box or in a custom box under the dash. By doing this with an iPod touch, they don’t have to do any cutting, and have something small and portable that can come with them anywhere they go, adding to the security of it all.

What do they give up making this trade? Well, there’s no FM radio, but there is navigation (if you use an iPhone, anyways), a video player, plus thousands of music selections on hand without carrying CDs. And technically, you could get satellite radio if you have a constant wi-fi connection, which although unlikely, might be an option if you’re parked for long periods of time.

I think we may be seeing more of these installs in the future. It’s not the perfect option, but for the builder who wants a simple and clean stereo without any fuss, this is an easy way to do it.