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* iPod Photo *
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The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > State of the Art: The iPod's New Trick: Photo Show
So, yes, the iPod Photo is beautifully done. But within hours of its unveiling, iPod cynics were asking some hard-nosed questions online. Why can't you download your pictures onto this thing straight from a digital camera? Why do you have to use iTunes, a music program, to manage the photo loading? And, inevitably: Why can't it play video?
After all, for the same $500, you can buy a Windows Mobile Portable Media Center that plays not only music and photos, but videos too. (Of course, its hard drive holds only half as much as the iPod Photo's, you can't use it to record your own TV shows, and it's three times the size of an iPod. But still.)
It's because the portable media center is too big and too heavy. I've been toying with one at work and it's a nice device, but it's just not an iPod. iPod are cool, portable, and the UI is very "get-able". I still have trouble wth the the Creative Zen I'm evaluating. The controls are quite wonky...too many buttons.
And who's to say that the iPod Photo can't play video? This is the same issue that MSN TV 2 faces today. Just because some new piece of technology doesn't have the feature you want right now, doesn't mean it won't in the future.
What about iTunes 4.8 and the first major iPod Photo software update? People have to consider whether there is a hardware or software limitation. Hardware limitation would be: Why can't I plug in my memory card from my digital camera and copy stuff to my iPod photo (btw: if it did this, I'd sell my two iPods and click above to order my 60GB iPod photo from Amazon)? Answer: there is not built in slot to do this. Maybe a peripheral like the Belkin card reader or Belkin digital camera interface will do the trick (see? it's hardware that's needed).
A question like "why can't it play video?" is easy to answer. It's because the software can't do that yet. There's no physical limitation right? You could easily put quicktime, AVIs, MPEG-2s on the iPod Photo...Apple just needs to build a player for those files (no trivial task, I might add).
Maybe they left it out to "wow" you later on...Maybe they feel the iPod's current for factor is not conducive to watching movies (I guarantee you they an Apple developer has made an iPod Photo play quicktime movies and maybe it wasn't as cool as they had hoped). Maybe...just maybe....Apple wants to redesign the whole thing in 6-8 months, drop the iPod form factor completely, do an industrial re-design and get a new device ready for video...vPod or mPod (movie Pod)? Maybe they have a whole strategy to combat the Tivo and Media Center 2005 Windows boxes in over a million liviing rooms now. How about an Apple media center (with requisite vPod, of course)?
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