August 30, 2007 4:00 AM PDT
Will 'the beat go on' with a new iPod?
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Several weeks of rumors about a pending iPod announcement were apparently confirmed late Tuesday afternoon, when Apple sent out an invitation to the media for an event on Wednesday in San Francisco. True to form, the company didn't explicitly say what was expected, but the white silhouette of a dancing iPod user didn't leave much to the imagination.
As the invite says, "the beat goes on" for Apple's iPod division. Almost six years after the debut of the iPod, Apple dominates the handheld music player market with 72.4 percent of the market in the first half of this year, according to research by The NPD Group. Even competitors such as SanDisk CEO Eli Harari have tipped their cap at Apple's run in the music player market, which shows no signs of slowing even though the company has made few changes to its iPod designs in two years.
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"They're very good," Harari said in a recent interview with CNET News.com. "You have to give credit where credit is due."
SanDisk recently unveiled the Sansa Clip in hopes of competing with the iPod Shuffle, but the company is currently focused more on the developing flash memory market for mobile phones than trying to develop an iPod killer.
Two years ago in September, CEO Steve Jobs upstaged the late arrival of Motorola's iTunes Rokr music phone with the introduction of the slim iPod Nano. Last year around this time, the company tweaked the Nano and the fifth-generation iPod with brighter screens and more capacity, but left the basic design of those two models alone while introducing a much smaller iPod Shuffle.
That clearly didn't hurt sales, as Apple moved 21 million iPods during its first quarter, which overlaps with the holiday shopping season. Now, Apple followers expect the company to make more radical changes that most likely involve improving the viewing experience on an iPod and introducing that capability to the iPod Nano.
Playing music on your iPod is old hat these days. After years of disdaining portable video players, Jobs gave in and a month after launching the iPod Nano introduced a video-player iPod along with making television shows available through the iTunes store. Last year, Apple expanded its offerings to include movies, but video downloads are still finding their place.
NPD surveyed 11,000 U.S. consumers older than age 13 earlier this year, and found that only 6.6 percent of respondents purchased a television show or movie online during the past six months. It's not clear how many folks are watching videos on their iPods as opposed to on their computers or TVs via Apple TV, but mobile video is still very much a niche experience at this point.
That's what Apple could be hoping to change on Wednesday. The most persistent rumors over the past couple of months have involved a redesign of both the current iPod video player as well as the smaller iPod Nano to provide a better viewing experience.
Only the fifth-generation iPod supports video playback at the moment, but it uses a 2.5-inch screen that after the launch of the iPhone looks impossibly small. Several Apple-oriented sites, as well as a few financial analysts, have gone on record predicting Apple will release an iPod with the same 3.5-inch widescreen display found on the iPhone but without the phone hardware.
Many also expect Apple to have a new version of the iPod Nano that supports video playback. It's not clear at all how this might be accomplished while preserving the diminutive size of the iPod Nano.
The iPod Nano currently comes with a 1.5-inch screen. If Apple made a Nano with a larger screen, that would force some design tradeoffs. One site, 9to5mac.com, briefly published photos of a video-player iPod Nano that was shorter and wider than the current version in order to accommodate the larger screen. The site said Apple's legal department requested the removal of the images, which doesn't necessarily mean that design is legitimate but certainly doesn't rule it out, either.
Given that the slim profile of the iPod Nano is one of its biggest attributes, it might seem odd that Apple would mess with the design. But Apple was quite willing to shelve its most popular iPod in 2005--the iPod Mini--to make way for the iPod Nano, and there's no reason to think the company has lost confidence in its ability to pull off a similar transition.
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for a very limited time and then turns into an ad on your player...
uh no thanks.
If Apple where to do wireless, it would not be "a la Zune" it would
be a real wireless option that would possibly download songs
directly from an iTunes client based on the iPod itself.
the 605 is 4.3" TFT touch screen, 800x480. plays music/photos/videos, can record videos with camera, can record from tv/dvd's with additioal dvr station.
What that says to me is that it's just as likely that the lesson Apple took from the experience is not to mess with success. They could have just updated the mini line with flash and not had to deal with all the PR headaches they got from the first-gen nano, which now looks like a bastard child in the iPod timeline.
An iPhone-style iPod seems probable to me, but I doubt they're going to mess much with the rest of the line (other than adding features and streamlining).
People want something more from their PMP than just the ability to playback 400 file formats.
iPhone? The first album art on the iPod he displayed was Sgt.
Pepper's. He played a little of "A little Help from My Friends" and
a little of "Lovely Rita". He continued on with the various features
of the iPhone and ends with the cover art for "Abbey Road".
None of it is sold on iTunes.
He makes a couple statements like, "this is the iPod" and "this is
the best iPod we have ever made". He also calls it a "Wide-Screen
iPod".
When he has almost completed introducing all of the iPhone
features, the three icons of the three devices appear on the big
screen with the caption. "All Together Now".
Since then Paul, John and Ringo's work has become available on
iTunes. The Beatle's catalog can't be far behind along with
George's.
Back to the "Wide-Screen iPod", is it possible that they will add a
Wide-Screen iPod fashioned after the iPhone and continue to sell
the exsisting line or at least part of it?
I have used Macs and, when forced to, Windows for 17 years and
from music to photography to design, Apple has made my life
richer and work easier. I don't doubt that their next
announcement will be a continuation of the same. Fanboy?
Maybe. But a happy fanboy just the same. And as far as this
whole Mac-Windows thing, just Let It Be. Bill Gates is a good
man doing good things in the world with the wealth he has
accumulated and he should be recognized for that.
Seeing "the best iPod ever" and then looking at my 30 GB iPod
photo is like "How ya gonna keep'em down on the farm after
they've seen Pariee".
isn't a Beatles announcement at all but I've been expecting a
complete Beatles catalog since the iPhone, especially if the new
iPod copies the iPhone appearance, and Apple is also wrapping up
a carrier in the E.U. Together it all ought to be worth about a
Billion Dollars in sales by XMas.
http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2007/08/emgeton_mini_one_windows_powered_iphone_clone.html
How soon before the iPod clones come out?
- Faster sync/transfer times for Nano, please
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by Mister Winky
September 3, 2007 12:49 PM PDT
- I recently picked up an 8GB Nano. It works well, sounds pretty good and the form factor is unbeatable. My only complaint: the transfer times for syncing music are *very* slow.
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See all 29 Comments >>I have a 4GB high speed SD card that I use to play music from my Treo. Transferring music to this card over a USB 2.0 card reader takes 1/3 the time it does to sync music to the iPod Nano over the same USB 2.0 connection. It seems clear that Apple used slow SD memory in the Nano to keep costs down, but I would have paid a $20 premium to have faster memory.
Maybe they can offer a "redline" model with fast memory?
-Mister Winky