ON A VIDEO iPOD WITH iPHONE FEATURES

iPATIENCE

Well, looks like Santa Claus won't be delivering updated video iPods that look like iPhones this Holiday season.  As this Barron's piece by Eric Savitz notes:

"Coming next from Apple (AAPL): iPods that look like iPhones.

At least, that’s what Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster expects. He wrote today that the company is likely to introduce new iPod models during or before the MacWorld ‘08 trade show in January. He expects to see iPods with the touchscreen technology used on the iPhone, but without the wireless phone and Internet features."

This also foots with some other speculation in the trade press, that given the iPhone's very strong ramp rate, Apple was likely to be constrained on the touch-screens for most of this year.  The touch-screen by the way, is the most expensive part of the iPhone.

So, it looks like my speculation a few days ago, of seeing a revamped video iPod by October may be a tad optimistic.

The inherent issue in using the iPhone as a full-fledged video iPod, is the limited, fixed, on-board memory.  Whether one has the 8Gb or the 4 Gb model, memory has to be shared between all the memory intensive applications on the iPhone. 

Besides regular iPod applications like music, video and photos, one also needs to allocate some memory for the on-board 2 megapixel camera, not to mention Outlook synced contact and calendar data. 

So a revamped video iPod should ideally have a mechanical hard drive, like the one found in the current video iPod.  Of course, that hopefully is ramped up to a 100 GB capacity or higher by early next year, from the current 80Gb top limit.

We iPod/iPhone fans can be a demanding lot, no?

Comments

[Mo]

Michael, one way to solve this problem is just YouTube your videos via WiFi, you don't need to store them on your phone. All the other time when you don't have a WiFi connection you can just day dream about 2009 when you have a real touchscreen Video iPod. :)