After making everybody jump at Macworld when they announced that iPod Touch users would need to pay to get access to the new applications for the platform, Apple has just silently introduced new higher-capacity versions of their iPhone and iPod Touch. The new devices sport 16 GB and 32 GB of flash respectively.

Personally, the phone capabilities of the iPhone is not something I need while the 32 GB of the touch just seems overkill. Seriously, how many songs and videos does someone want to carry around? I recently converted my ENTIRE music collection to Mp3 format in 129 kbps format and it clocked in at 9 GB. In a 16 GB device, this still leaves 5-6 GB of space for videos and other content. Of course, I only placed music that I legitimately own. If I started to download and put any kind of music on there, then I guess that I could use up a lot more room.

After feeling outraged at Apple a few days ago about their update strategy for the iPod Touch, it turns out that the firmware update is free while it is only the new applications that you need to pay for. So if you don’t need E-mail, Notes, Maps, Weather or Stock, you are not forced to buy the core and get fixes to the core functionality of the device. So maybe Apple is not so devilish after all.

If you own an iPod Touch, you will probably be quite surprised to hear that Apple just announced that their latest update for the device will require you to shell out 20$. Instead of only being a small software update, this new package adds 5 new applications to the Touch, namely Email, Stocks, Notes, Weather and Maps. So, on the one side, I understand a bit that they might want to charge for the update, however, only people who bought the device before this announcement will have to pay for it. If you buy the device from now on, the update will be free.

I don’t know if this is the kind of decision that they could go back on and eventually make the update free. We’ll see in due time. What is also interesting is that this announcement comes at the same time as Apple confirmed that the SDK for the iPhone and iPod Touch will be released in February, thus opening the door for third-party official apps for the devices. Let’s just hope that there is no need to pay again to be able to use these third-party applications.