Handicapping Apple's September 5 Event

It's official. Apple has sent out invitations to a media event to be held on September 5, 2007. The invitation's slogan "The beat goes on" and iPod graphic don't leave much to the imagination as to what the company will announce.

The real question is exactly what Apple will do to the venerable iPod?

• Will it simply be the same old-school 5G iPod with a Sammy 160GB 1.8-inch hard drive inside?
• Will Apple dump moving platter hard drives entirely in favor of flash-based Solid State Drives (SSDs)?
• Will the new iPod have a new 6G interface, previously leaked?
• Will Apple announce a stumpy new iPod nano with a large-ish iPod video display? (Please, no.)
• Will it be a complete migration of the iPod to the large touchscreen form-factor popularized by the iPhone?
• If Apple does indeed move the iPod to the iPhone platform, will it ship with WiFi, Bluetooth, Safari and Mail – or a subset thereof? Then what happens to the nano and the shuffle?

There is always the potential that Apple will make changes to the iTunes store, announcing more content, less DRM, new artist exclusives, tweaked pricing, OTA iPhone downloads (please!), the list goes on...

What do you want from Apple on the 5th?