Well imagine if you can a device that slips in to your pocket, no bigger than a wallet. It’s white, comes with a screen that covers half it’s face and a set of ear bud’s that have a built in lapel microphone. Not only that but it holds 10,000 of your favorite MP3’s, stores your contact list, calendar’s and even holds your notes for later viewing and it even has a 15 hour battery life.
What am I talking about, well it’s the next generation iPod of course. This year Apple stands to make some interesting ground breaking advances in portable technology. With the success of the iPod line what else is left for the device that seems to have everyone talking?
I predict that a move will be made by apple to combine cellular technology in to the iPod. Possibly with a company such as Qualcomm who makes the CDMA technology for North American Market’s, but maybe further their Motorola partner ship by buying technology from them. Who knows! But what I can say is this, what is the next logical step for iPod development?
Building on functionality such as the iPod’s ability to store your contact list and allowing it to read and dial numbers from it. Using the already available built in recording function to use the microphone for telephone calling, and a touch screen for manual dialing. Add one button to the face of the iPod and you can switch it in and out of “iPhone” mode to make a call, or to pause the music to answer an incoming one.
With Apple’s digital media convergence an iPod Phone helps them jump in to the Telecommunications market while maintaining fresh new appeal to their clients. But then again who knows what the big Apple has for us, either way it should be an interesting year.
Apple has no interest in the telephony market.
I’d think Itunes integration into a wireless iPod would be more likely.
BORR-RING!
wireless iPod … umm my iPod has no wires, unless what you MENT was blue tooth enabled iPod to allow wireless headphones.
But I could see an iPod phone … why not.
ipod + Cellphone = uberCellpod(?)
Not gonna happen. Here’s why.
95%+ of cell phones are sold by Cell service provider. Which essentially means that the cell providers control the channel of distribution that consumers use to get cell phones. Therefore the only way they will allow such an iP(hone)OD is if the cell phone companies get their cut. Unfortunately for Apple, their cut is pretty big. They don’t want consumers to be able to upload songs from their itunes or computer to their phone because they want consumers to download the music from their services. (side note: every major celll provider is currently rolling out their own "music store" that allows users to download music from to their cell phones via the cellular network. Not only then do the providers get a cut of the music sale, they also get to charge you the 99 cents for the download fee. So why would they sell a phone that circumvents their pricey music plans?)
Then we have the big bad music industry that needs their cut. The music industry feels that users should pay them more for music-to-cellPhone because of the added convenice of being able to get a song anytime anywhere you want on demand. These things mean there is very little wiggle room for Apple to make any profit, thus making it unattractive for them to move into the market.
These things mean that the price of a downloaded song to your mp3 phone could be $3.99-4.99 per track (or more).
Now I be wrong, and maybe there will be an Ipod Phone in the near future, but it’s not gonna be before Apple, the cell providers and the music industry reconcile their differences and figure out how to make a good profit that satisfies everyone (including the consumers).
my 2 cents.
All these factors together make the phone+mp3 market very difficult to enter for a company other then a cellular service provider.
Jeff,
Thanks for your comments. You have not left an email address so I can’t get back to you privatly, but I was just wondering how you managed to find my little corner of the internet. I always reply to comments and for fun I always ask how people came to find me.
-Christopher
Stupid is forever, ignorance can be fixed.