The iPod Gets WiFi, Sort Of

thecounterfeit writes "Engadget has a story on Pocketster Pro, a new application that lets you add WiFi to the iPod. The catch? You have to connect it to a Pocket PC with both USB Host capability and WiFi first, but once it's up and running you can wirelessly swap tunes with any other similarly equipped iPods."

Comments

Aireo 802.11 Interface Works Today

[wyngarth]

SoniqCast's Aireo player already has 802.11b (11Mb) integrated already. Interesting option to download files to it while it's sitting in your car. Interesting quirk however, is that it doesn't take DRM-protected files. SoniqCast says they're working on it. Good think I still have all my P2P files...

An inevitable evolution of bluetooth phones

[ehack]

An inevitable evolution of bluetooth phones is going to be P2P. Tell your phone what you're looking for, go for a walk on campus, or have coffee at starbucks, and it'll be there when you get back home. The phones eg. P800 can already be used for listening to MP3s, and they can be programmed in Java and C++, it's only a matter of month till we get fully integrated Bluetooth P2P.

iPod Exchange Provider

[powerpuffgirls]

Will we start seeing hotspots (intentional or otherwise) allowing iPod users to exchange files?

Imagine a pseudo-P2P service run by hotspots installed (or infected) with the P2P apps......

Forget file-swapping

[ElGanzoLoco]

Forget file-swapping, and give me an iPod that can stream music directly to airport-express... I really believe this is what the next-generation iPod will be. Battery life will be a bitch though. In 2 or 3 revisions we probably even have Airport-express-extreme which will do audio AND video, and the assorted iPod capable of streaming your photos, mpegs and mp3s to your home cinema. This will be the day I buy another iPod.

Re:Forget file-swapping

[Anonymous Coward]

don't forget it! imagine a future where a lot of people own ipods. you're sitting on a bus and you get a "knock." another ipod user activated a "wireless knock" to check to see if anyone on the bus had an ipod, and it found you. you accept this "knock" which lets him browse your songs, and you can browse his as well. you swap a couple of songs and move along, perhaps w/o knowing who you just exchanged songs with. illegal? maybe, but fucking cool!

Re:There is a way to connect two iPods

[mrchaotica]

It's too bad nobody has come out with a little box with a firewire controller, disk controller, and just enough logic to do a one-way sync. If you could make it cheap enough (and perhaps build in an uplink, so it could act like a firewire hub or something) I could see it selling (however, IANA Market Analyst)

Re:This is too fucked up.

[iamacat]

Plenty of people like the PocketPC because it has an interface superior to the Palm, and the OS is less buggy

This could go either way. Why should programs I close on PPC just hang around in the background until I run out of memory and kill them through Start/Settings/System/Memory/Running Programs?

But mostly both Palm and PPC suck, especially when it comes to developing software. Sun 3 with a 68K processor, 8MB of ram and 100MB hard drive was a usable development machine with a standard C++ compiler - exceptions and all, on-"device" debugger, an easy to use UI toolkit (XView) and lots more. For todays 400Mhz XScale PDAs with 256MB RAM, I would settle for an equivalent functionality from remote. But no, we get crippled compilers (CE), ridiculous heap sizes (Palm) and tedious UI programming (both, although .Net is making a dent).