5:30pm, Friday, October 26: Hundreds form a four-block line outside the Apple Store in Ginza, Tokyo, braving the rain and cold (the Doodler being one of them), waiting for the doors to open at 6pm for the launching of Mac OS 10.5. One more:

Picture gallery (on the street and in the store), and full first-person account this weekend. (Yeah, I took these pictures - it’s my first time to be part of a real, authentic Apple Store wait-in as opposed to just reading about them and thinking, what idiots these guys are; I would never do that. Famous last words. I was tickled pink, although that may be from the freezing rain. More later.)

It’s official. Apple’s made a habit of producing long, large and reasonably thorough introductory videos for major new hardware and software they’re releasing.

It’s great for hungry fanboys and tech journalists who can’t get it elsewhere, and I guess for the growing number of folk who want a look at the stuff before plunking down coin for the new stuff coming out of Cupertino. Largely overkill, the hype usually should be enough for other manufacturers, but Apple tends to go overboard about these things (hey, new iPhone TV ads are still coming out up to now, man). Don’t have a problem with it, though.

Recently, some of the better ones have been the iPhone and iPod Touch guided tours (although they need serious help sourcing less awkward hosts for these things - less of the hand gestures, guys! And seriously, we’re sick of the black t-shirts.)

Now, they’ve just released on the Apple site a half-hour video for OS X Leopard, which is coming out on Friday. (For which I will take off from the Tokyo Motor Show and sneak out to the Ginza Apple Store on the 26th to see how they do a product rollout in Japan.) Cool. Us fanboys anticipate these videos like sequels to the Transformers movie.

Watch the Leopard Guided Tour in different resolutions or download it (108mb for iPods and 379mb for the bigger version) here.

(Crossposted in Mobile Philippines)

Those of you with iTunes Store accounts have probably made it a weekly habit to harvest free songs and videos from the store, but this week it’s an especially interesting haul.

Aside from the usual free songs, this week you can get for free the third season premiere episode of Prison Break, the pilot episode of K-Ville (a cop show set in post-Katrina New Orleans), and the pre-air pilot episode of The Big Bang Theory (a half-hour comedy about two geeks who live beside a pretty girl they can’t seem to get to know).

As usual, the free stuff doesn’t hang around the store forever, so go get them while they’re hot, along with the other free stuff you can find on in there.

Some eagle-eyed German Apple fans have divined a little detail on their webpage for the iPod Touch that Steve Jobs seems to have forgotten to mention - Bluetooth on the new player. This opens up a whole new Pringles can of worms (albeit good worms, to be sure). See the upper right hand corner of the pic above, that tiny little symbol beside the battery icon? Well, I’ll be damned.

One wonders why the Jobster forgot to announce it. Or maybe it was a feature they removed before the announcement, but someone forgot to tell the graphic artist setting up the website. Whatever. But like I keep saying, it’s all good.

See the pic in context on the German Apple site here. Then if you got time to kill, go through the other pics with a magnifying glass to see if there’s anything else we missed and tell us about it.