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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Semi-obvious iPhone/iPod futures

I was among the crowd of people clamoring for a phone-less iPhone-like iPod back when Steve Jobs first announced the device at the January 2007 Macworld, and I still think that would be a great idea, especially if it could be fitted with a real hard drive. But while wrestling with some weird sync issues over the weekend, another thought occurred to me, and while I'm sure this is equally obvious, I'll spell it out anyway: Apple should sell an iPod-less iPhone as well.

You might call such a thing the iPhone nano (with apologies to David Letterman and his even more obvious recent spoof of such a device). And here's why I think this would be a killer idea: After I couldn't get the iPhone to sync with my Outlook calendar properly, I decided to nuke from space ("restore" the device in iPhone parlance) and see what the sync experience is like on the Mac. No surprise, it's better. But since I didn't have any music on my Mac at first, my initial sync was just calendar (Google Calendar via iCal) and contacts (Yahoo Mail contacts via Apple's Address Book application). This information takes up almost no space at all on the device. But what you're left with is a stunningly usable phone and personal information manager.

Indeed, once you get rid of most of the storage space--I'm thinking 1 GB would do it for whatever random photos you might take--you can also dispense with a lot of the battery, since that's pretty much only needed for media playback anyway. You could therefore make a phone-only iPhone--the iPhone nano--that was about one-half to two-thirds the size of the existing device, while retaining the same basic proportions. A smaller phone would be highly desirable to a lot of people, methinks.

Meanwhile, a future video iPod that's based on the iPhone could arguably be a bit bigger than the current iPhone, while still losing the phone features (and associated monthly charges). This could become the new high-end iPod, designed primarily for TV, movie, and other video content.

Just a thought.

Labels: Apple, Digital media, iPhone, iPod, Mobile

[ Posted at 10:30 AM | Permalink ]