I am not a fan of Apple, and frustration with (often recurring) bugs with iPods has led me to strongly consider jumping ship for a few years now, but then I actually try the various companies' software for their devices and I'm always left with an inescapable conclusion: no matter how flawed the iPod platform may be, it's still better than anything the competition is offering.
That is kind of how I feel. Back in 2006, I was thinking about getting a Zune. The scren was larger and I head that the hardware was pretty solid. I then won a Halo 3 Zune from GameStop during the midnight release of Halo 3. I tried things out but couldn't get past the PC software (that and the screen was blurry, I don't care what people say, the 1G and 2G Zune screens are blurry). In the end, the whole iPod experience is better than what the competition offers. It doesn't matter if their hardware can playback everything and make me coffee in the morning, the iPod environment is just better.
I don't have any gripes against photo functionality and iTunes. It does what it does; copy photos to your iPod. The inclusion of photos capabilities into iTunes would complicate things. Would iTunes be able to print these photos, what about basic editing, how about saving the photos to different formats, etc? You start getting the point where iTunes is the ugly stepchild of MS Paint. That is also when iTunes becomes way too complicated for its main purpose: audio and video playback/management. It is a double-edged sword where greater photo functionality would be nice but you don't want it to get too complicated. Besides, any iTunes photo functions won't be equal to what Picasso can do (a free photo app from Google).
The one thing I want to see in the new iTunes release is access to QuickTime's true VBR AAC mode. iTunes has always used QuickTime's CBR or VBR_constrained settings, I want to see full VBR AAC files encoded by iTunes/QuickTime. QuickTime X (7.6.3) appears to have increased the quality of the iTunes AAC encoder by providing really transparent results at even 128kbps VBR. Encoding true VBR AAC files with QuickTime is just too much work. You have to open the lossless file in QuickTime, save it as an MOV file, open that in QuickTime, and then save it as an mpeg-4 file while passing the audio through. This whole process takes about 40 seconds for each song and track tags are lost in the process (so add another 30-40 seconds per song to manually enter the tags). It currently just isn't worth it to encode true VBR AAC files in QuickTime. Easy access to true VBR settings in iTunes would alleviate any previous headaches. I at least want to see three settings: 128kbps VBR (q60), 192kbps VBR (q85), and the maximum setting (q127 which produces around 310kbps VBR files). It would be better to have a visual slider so that the user can select which value to encode at but that may complicate things.
So true VBR AAC encoding is what I want to see in iTunes. I would like to see support for hardware accelerated video playback on Windows since QuickTime (and thus, iTunes) use software acceleration for playback. I have a new netbook with a Broadcom Crystal HD accelerator that can handle 40Mbps mpeg-4 AVC, VC-1, and mpeg-2 videos. I would like to playback iTunes Store purchased content on my netbook. Currently, 480p videos are even choppy when I watch them full screen and 720p playback is impossible. However, I can fire up a program that supports the HD accelerator in my netbook and get full 1080p playback without issues. Come on Apple, both iTunes and QuickTime support hardware acceleration on the Mac OS X platform. Why not give Windows users the same benefits? After all, Windows users represent over 70% of all iPod sales.
I would rather have true VBR AAC encoding in iTunes though.