The iPhone has no problem playing back video in aspect ratios that don’t match its screen. They simply get letterboxed, or you can double-tap the screen to zoom in and cut off the edges. There’s no reason a widescreen Nano couldn’t do the same thing.

In the same way, games could continue to work in portrait orientation with letterboxing.

Kevin Rose added info on iTunes 8 when he was on the This Week in Tech podcast on Sunday. He said it was going to add “similar music” features, a la Pandora and Last.fm. His source for the iTunes 8 info was different from his source for the widescreen Nano info, BTW. He also e-mailed all the photos he had received to Leo Laporte, with identifying data kept in. Laporte said that that data was convincing (and then he deleted the photos, as requested).

“Apple also needs to add remote functionality for controlling Apple TV to iTunes”

Why? Just because it’s theorectically possible? You should know better. There’s no compelling reason for controlling a set top box from a computer on a desktop or even a laptop on a couch, as opposed to from a handheld device (iPhone, iPod touch) you’re likely to already have in your pocket.

“Apple also really needs to deliver some sort of central media server, possibly tacked onto Apple TV.”

What, like Windows Home Server? Come on. The Apple home ecosystem is all about peer sharing, not server-client. iTunes, iPhoto, AppleTV, etc. all detect other peers within the same network and allow sharing.

A better idea along these lines would be simply better synchronization between multiple computers’ media libraries. All that would be needed would be ways to classify which data should be synchronized. This can be done with playlists, just like synchnonizing an iPod or iPhone. I’m sure Apple doesn’t want to get into a fight with the music labels and studios about file sharing, though, or they would have done it already. As it is that’s why you can’t copy music from shared libraries. (Note that iPhoto CAN copy photos from shared galleries, though!)