Apple Launches iTunes 8, Launching iPhone 2.1 on Friday

During the “Let’s Rock” press event this morning, Apple confirmed that iTunes 8 would ship out today with a new intelligent playlist composition feature which will be called Genius as well as a text-to speech feature dubbed Accessibility.

Lost in the hype for the new nano and iPod Touch refresh, however was the pending release of iPhone OS 2.1 on Friday which will enable all of the above and address nagging issues with improved battery life, fewer call drops, crashing problems, increased speed for iTunes backups and various other fixes which have been asked of Apple since the debacle that was OS 2.0 and subsequent updates.