It's always exciting to hear news about the new album, no matter how small the details.
If the album is going to have less tracks, then I wont be too pleased if there are less than 10. And if this is the case, the length of the songs have to be longer than the average LP song which Mike seems to have hinted at a few times now. I'd go for an average of 5 minutes plus per track. If you look at an album like Metallica's 'Death Magnetic', it has 10 songs which average about 7 minutes each which doesn't make the album seem too short. Metallica always make long songs anyway.
That also brings up another point in regards to how much 'filler' material there will be on the album. If there are less songs, this means that just about every track needs to be a strong track. Once again, I use 'Death Magnetic' as a very good example of this. To me, there are absolutely no filler tracks on that album. I've read Mike talk about making an album of songs 'that don't suck' in the past, so if this means 10 tracks of incredibly strong material (i.e. no filler songs) and they are longer than average, then I wont be complaining about that at all.
In addition to the album, I can see LP releasing some B-Sides like we saw with No Roads Left (which really should have been on MTM if you ask me, along with ATL) after the album is released.
Hearing that the artwork for the album is looking to be the best yet excites me. MTM was very bland and nothing special. I get the same feeling on Meteora as well. I can't wait to see it.
As for the release date of the album, as long as it doesn't get postponed too much, I can realistically see a release mid next year. Mike says 5 songs are pretty much done, so that's about half the album already. I'm so pumped and can't wait to hear it.
In regards to playing not playing some older songs live, I think that's a shame and I don't see why they can't mix up the setlist every so often. I've seen the setlists for the recent tour and noticed that they pretty much play the same songs each set. Sure, a lot of concert goers want to see the more 'popular' songs, but shouldn't songs like Papercut, With You and A Place For My Head to name a few deserve to be part of the rotation? They need to mix it up a bit more, even if they change a couple of songs here and there.
And finally the iPhone game, it sounds pretty interesting and pretty cool that we get another new song (as long as it is a proper song and not some short demo like track). I'll be buying it as soon as it's released.