By LAWRENCE TAN

Every September, Apple fans around the world brace themselves for the company’s annual iPod show, which usually sees Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs unleashing a slew of new iPods, iPod Touches, and iTunes upgrades.

While last year’s ‘Let’s Rock’ event brought out huge cheers for its iPod nano 4G introduced in a smorgasbord of bright rainbow hues, and the iPod Touch 2G, this year’s 'It's only rock and roll'-themed fest didn’t quite live up to its pre-show hype. And neither did the new products.

The iPod nano 5G was to be the leading star of the show this year, but other than a newly added video camera, a slightly larger display (at 2.2-inches, an improvement of 0.2-inch over 4G), FM radio and a microphone for voice recording, it’s not a big leap from the previous iteration.

The major talking point was that the camera doesn’t shoot stills. Intriguingly, Apple has decided that the third generation iPod Touch doesn’t need a camera (still or video), even though the tiny nano 5G gets at least a video camera. The saving grace is that Apple has cut prices on all three models: 8GB, 32GB and 64GB, and incorporated a faster processor sourced from the iPhone 3GS.

Apple also brightened up the Apple Shuffle offerings, with new colors of bright pink, green and blue, and a stainless steel 4GB Special Edition, and promised more iPod shuffle-friendly headphones would hit the stores soon. Left out but not entirely forgotten, the iPod classic gets a bump in capacity to 160GB with no change in price.

Apple