Admittedly, I've never been the biggest iPod fan, but is anyone else underwhelmed by the "new" product announcements today? Lets look at what happened:

• iPod Shuffle: new colors
  
• iPod Nano: IMO, this was the biggest announcement, although the old insistence that nobody wants to watch video on a two inch screen is echoing in my ears.
  
• iPod: now the iPod Classic, and all metal. Seems this will probably be a weak seller now that there's the...
  
• iPod Touch: okay, call me cynical, but to me the only interesting thing about this product is that it tells us the cell phone part of the iPhone costs $200.
  

Don't get me wrong, despite my continuing dislike of the closed Apple system, iTunes, and lack of variety of format playback, I was absolutely prepared to get that iPod Touch. Then I saw that it was flash-based, and that was the end of that.

Why bother at that point? I really don't understand the philosophy of portable video devices that have large screens and not enough room for a decent amount of video. Example: for the holiday weekend, I left my laptop behind and loaded up my Archos with the entire third season of BSG (which I'll post about in a couple days). I watched almost all of it in 20 hours of driving, in addition to a couple movies and a few vidcasts. I also had most of my music collection on there. And heck, we're just talking about my 30GB player, which is tiny these days.

Hopefully the second generation Touch will have a hard disk-based option.

So what is everyone else's thoughts?