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KT Tunstall is the cover story for the February 5th issue of iProng Magazine, released today for free download. KT tells iProng about her new album as well as her performance at the Steve Jobs Apple Event in September. Actor-comedian Sinbad also sits down with iProng to discuss all things Apple...and of course there's coverage of the newly announced 32 GB iPod touch and 16 GB iPhone.



Also featured in this issue: interviews with Steve Boyett of Podrunner, Paul McCoy of 12 Stones, and Otep Shamaya of OT3P. The reviews section includes Sonic the Hedgehog for iPod, the latest album reviews, and this month's highest-rated iPod and iPhone accessories.

Something happened on the way to me not caring about the iPhone jumping to sixteen gigabytes. For awhile now I've considered eight gigabytes to be the ideal capacity for me and my iPod/iPhone endeavors. Sure, we all want limitless capacity, but at some point you've got to make the tradeoff of capacity vs. physical size. I spent a few years trying to get comfy within the four gigs provided by the early iPod nano, and while I made it work for me, it never felt comfortable. My sync playlist of eight or nine hundred songs (less than a fifth of my collection) nearly filled the device, meaning that if I wanted to add a new song or album, something would need to be removed right then and there to make room - and forget about having room for podcasts or more than a handful of photos.

But then the iPhone came along at eight gigs, and I finally felt that the digital living room I was being confined to was plenty big, so to speak. My sync playlist has grown to about fifteen hundred songs and yet I can still fit new music onto the device whenever I want to. There's enough room for the latest episodes of my six or seven favorite podcasts, and even room for a few hundred photos and a music video or two to boot. In fact I was so pleased with eight gigs that when it came time to acquire an iPod touch for testing purposes (a device I admittedly knew I wouldn't use much), I opted for the eight gig model despite the fact that a sixteen gig iPod touch was already available at the time.

Accordingly, all throughout my seven-plus months as an iPhone user, I was all set to dismiss - at least for me personally - the sixteen gig iPhone we all knew was eventually coming. But along the way I realized a few things. For starters, I spent a bit of time with both my iPod classic and my video iPod (80 and 30 gigs, respectively), and I remembered that I like having all of my music with me. Certainly not enough to resort to carrying an outdated, oversized iPod alongside my iPhone, but you know what? It wouldn't kill me to have a little bit more of my music collection on my iPhone. But the real moment of pause came when I rented a full-length movie from iTunes, just over a gigabyte in size, and realized - gasp - it wouldn't fit on my iPhone unless I removed some existing music. Sheesh, I thought those days were over with.

So although I'm definitely not going to rush out and replace my eight gig iPhone with a new sixteen gig model any time soon, and I don't expect a whole heck of a lot of other existing iPhone users to do so either, today just might represent a bigger breakthrough in terms of ushering more folks into the iPhone/touch era than it may initially appear. We all know a few users who are still clutching their aging thirty gig video iPod, saying "not until I can fit all my music onto a new-school iPod!" Well guess what? The new iPod touch holds thirty-two gigs. And while the new iPhone still only holds half that much, Apple's flagship handheld device just might have moved a little closer to being a true mainstream product today...if only by virtue of inching closer to what we thought was the standard in capacity all the way back in 2006.

random thoughts...

- I've concluded that as I rarely carry an iPod anymore unless I'm using it to out an accessory, and since there are no games for my always-with-me iPhone, all those iPod games have been released just to taunt me.

- You know you're out of touch with pro basketball when one team trades several players and several draft picks just to acquire another player, and it's someone you haven't even heard of.

- My frustration with the latest version of iPhoto hasn't abated now that I've spent a full month with it - I'm actually more frustrated now. I use iPhoto quite a bit for cropping and resizing photos for both the iProng.com product reviews and the photography in iProng Magazine, and I now have to budget slightly more time for both tasks because of how crappy iPhoto has suddenly become at doing the same basic tasks the previous versions all did so well. I say this without a hint of melodrama or overreaction: if I could downgrade to the previous iPhoto without having to completely re-do my photo library in the process, I'd do it without thinking twice. And that's a sad condemnation of what has been, for the past five or so years, one of the best consumer-level multimedia software tools ever made.

- My SuperBowl prediction: it'll be the Giants and the Patriots. Wait, what? We already knew that much? Dang!

- I still can't believe Santana has been traded to the Mets. I didn't even know the Mets were in need of a lead guitarist.

- Next iProng Radio episode is out tomorrow, next iProng Magazine issue is out the day after that. Busy few days :-)