Apple has announced another press event scheduled for September 5th.  The tagline for this event is "The beat goes on".  These are always fun and I wanted to throw my thoughts and predictions in the ring. 

One of the obvious things that I believe (not surprisingly) Apple is going to announce is a 6th generation iPod that takes on the touch interface of the iPhone.  I think they are completely going away with the click wheel (it's so 2002) and going the way of the iPhone touch interface.  I don't think much will change with the iPod interface that is on the iPhone currently with one hardware button for sleep/volume.  I don't think that they will announce an upgrade to the Nano or Shuffle line even though there are some rumors out there.  They usually do this later down the line anyway.

Doing this of course will make the value of the iPhone a little less.  One of the three main pillars of the iPhone is that it is the best iPod ever made.  If they make an iPod that is just as good for obvious less money, it will make the value of the iPhone seem less than stellar.  I know many people who are just using their iPhones as iPods because they don't want to switch over to AT & T or the iPhone just doesn't replace the functionallity of their current phone.  This means that Apple should have some announcements concerning the iPhone.  They need to make it more valuable and they need to breath some life into the line that really has not had any updates (besides bug fixes) or news attached to it since it was launched.

So I believe that Apple will announce some iPhone updates.  I'm gonna bet that one of them is ringtones available through iTunes.  I believe they may also add games since the new iPod will need some updated games for the new interface.  They will offer them for the iPhone as well.  Another announcement that may not be as likely but would be a brilliant move by Apple would be the announcement of making the iTunes store available over the air over the iPhone.  Think about it.  This would make the iPhone a lot more exciting to own than just a regular iPod and it is a feature that users have been clamoring for.  They obviously couldn't do video over the slow EDGE network but they could probably add the ability to download songs from iTunes over EDGE.  They would have to save movies and videos until version 2 but it would give them a chance to test the service out now.

Those are my main predictions.  I also believe they will release some Leopard info and probably announce a firm date for availablity.  Probably give out some more feature hints as well.  I will be hoping for a Mac tablet like I always do but I really doubt that will be there.  Maybe after Leopard but well see...