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New Apple iPod with Photo Capabilities
artlu was the first of many to submit: "I was just watching my Dow Jones streaming news wire, and I saw that Apple is releasing a new iPod that will have photo captabilities. The news stated that the new iPod will be able to hold 25,000 photos as well as your traditional iPod functionality." Apple's got a page up about the iPod Photo and of course a press release.
You can get cheaper products for $50 which will allow you to do more creative slideshows, effects, etc.
I think Apple missed the boat here. The killer function they should add to the iPod is a camera- which goes along nicely with the photo storage features. Nothing flashy or expensive, but for another $50 they could add a lens that's better than the cell phone cams.
Photo *display* capabilities. When I think of photo capabilities, I think of something take can _take_ photos.
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Photos and contacts and solitaire sounds like fun stuff, but what about any new audio related features--you know, since it's an audio portable and all.
Something tells me they managed to overlook Gapless Playback and OGG/FLAC support again.
that photo capability as a secondary feature is just about worthless. Pretty soon, I'll have a phone that surfs the web, plays games, takes photos, cooks dinner, plays mp3s, wavs, oggs, avis, mpegs, and can predict the weather. None of which I'll be using since my ipod will do that anyways.
Does anyone else think that this a bit overkill. 60Gb is a LOT when you are just talking about music and pictures.
Think movies.
See the last paragraph here.
Here we go again, people saying this iPod won't be a hit. They said the same thing on the original iPod and the iPod Mini. Those were both huge hits, and this one will be too.
They just added Album Art, but I want to see the entire Album insert, lyrics, artist facts and news. How hard would that be to add for songs purchased from Itunes. Think of the Value-add. It would be nice to have a FM transmitter was well.
Maybe I'm a luddite, but I just don't care for photos on my iPod.
:P Problem was, you had to navigate through 3 pages of icons just to get to the app you needed.
Part of what makes my iPod so nice is that its interface is really simple. I think that this is due, in part, to the fact that it doesn't do a large variety of things. All it does is play music based on playlist, artist, or album.
I've seen similar cluttering on my TiVo. It used to be just about 4 or 5 menu items on the main screen. Now, it's packed from the top of the screen to the bottom.
My old Symbian phone did tons of stuff. Games, calendar, to-do list, camera, web browser... you could even make phone calls with it.
I don't want my iPod to become like my cell phone.
...about the original iPod, and iPod mini.
And they're runaway successes, to put it mildly.
On one hand, we had analysts and pundits of all types saying Apple will fail if it *didn't* include photo/video functionality in a handheld, and now we've got a luminary here predicting it will fail because it *did*.
Well, I think I'll trust Apple's judgment on this one, considering it seems to know what it's doing, thank you.
I've owned a Canon Digital Rebel (EOS 300D) for a little over 3 months now and have acquired approximately 7GB of photos in that time (not counting RAW images). This is purely a hobby. I'm sure other amateur photographers will agree with me that 60GB isn't really overkill, even just for photos, let alone for both photos and music.
Why didn't you do some research before reformatting your iBook? Why didn't you do some research on how to pull music from your iPod back into iTunes? This process is very well documented all over the place.
It sounds to me like you are either trolling, or really didn't know what you were doing when you started this process.
Remember, data, especially purchased data, is important. Always back it up.
Looks like it's time for this link again.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. -You know who...
Put readers for all of them in, and grow the iPod photo even further (already noted that it's thicker than the 4G iPod)
Build multiple versions of the iPod photo, each with a different card reader to minimize size impact, but complicating manufacture, inventory, and marketing (40GB/SD, 60GB/xD, 40GB/Memory stick, etc.)
Leave the card reader out to keep things simple (and less expensive to manufacture and support), and let third parties fill in the gap with an external device -- possibly like a revised version of the existing Belkin card reader
I'm not surprised Apple chose #3. Now, why Apple didn't design the iPod photo to download photos directly from a digital camera via a USB 2.0 cable, that's another question entirely...
"My order takes pride in knowing all that can be known, and most of all the rest..." --Galen
The second reason why Mr. Jobs isn't offering "video on the iPod" is for legal liability.
Yes, the Archos lets you watch xvid/divx movies on it, but I'm willing to bet they don't include a DVD ripper. So this is a niche product where they assume the buyers know how to get xvid movies (or rip them themselves instead of sucking them via P2P).
So if Mr. Jobs were to offer an iPod with video capability, he'd have to have the infrastructure in place to support it. iTunes offered out of the box MP3/AIFF ripping for the iPod.
Odds are, once he can convince the MPAA the way he convinced the RIAA that having digital movies available for download is not the equivalent to the "Boston Strangler", then we'll see an iPod Video as well as an iPod Photo. (Though, I am rather curious to see how an iPod video would handle battery life - a moot point at this stage.)
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
iTunes instead of iPhoto
There is no iPhoto for Windows, hence Apple had to embed photo management into iTunes to support the dual-platform iPod.
If Apple is indeed developing iPhoto for Windows -- which would take some time -- then it wouldn't make sense for Apple to wait and push the delivery of the new iPod past this Christmas season (esp. if they could simply hack iTunes to handle basic photo management).
Am I the only one who wants to be able to plug a camera directly into a mp3 player and transfer photos without needed a 3rd party (belkin) widget?
I don't really see the appeal of the ipod photo otherwise - I think my blackberry pager/phone has higher resolution
ostiguy
I bit the bullet and purchased a 40GB 4G in July/August to upgrade/replace a 128MB RCA Lyra that started my addiction of having music with me at all times. In the 3 months of heavy use of my iPod, here's the list of what i would like to see:
integrated SD-memory reading (my dig camera uses SD cards, they're smaller than CF, and while not as flexible as far as legacy use and capacity, almost every portable device i've looked into purchasing uses SD or xD memory over CF.
REMOVEABLE BATTERY - for the love of christ would they get this one right. it would really ease my mind significantly if they'd make it interchangable at home, maybe on the fly, where i can keep a spare battery handy as i do for my cell phone and dig camera, (2 spares in teh case of the camera) and when one goes dead, i do a swap. the thought of having to send my 4G off in a year or two at the cost of an ADDITIONAL $100 because they found it more convienent to design an integrated battery on an otherwise superior product gives me shivers.
iCal and Address Book for Windows, or at the very least an iTunes extention that lets you manage these two precious entities. Oh, and a smart playlist parameter for whether or not a song is checked!
Adjustable click wheel sensitivity and a dedicated reset button. My wheel has the most annoying tendancy to NOT want to move ONE click. no matter how softly i caress it or how little i bump it i usually move 2 or 3. maybe it's because i have larger than normal fingers or something. idk. also, if the thing has the remote possibility of choking on a bad mp3 and crashing, i'd love to have a manual reset button that doesn't go through software. That process sounds like something M$ came up with. many times mine will crash and run itself dead because the reset method doesn't work. even docked.
If they're going to integrate a color screen onto the ipod they shouldn't have went the LCD route, but used emerging tech like full color organic Electro-Luminescent displays (think Pioneer's high end car stereos) Sony just released a PDA in japan based on this screen design, which is far superior to LCD for the parameters of a portable device. It requires no battery-hungry and heat generating back light. It has better viewability (word?) in direct sunlight than LCDs. It may not have the color detail, but the resolutions are comparable. It would be suitable for a small display like the iPod Photo's. This would ahve allowed them to retain at least somehwat more of the battery life.
Are you listening Mr Jobs? Some of these things are not that damned difficult to implement, and others would just take a bit of time and effort.
I bought my iPod because it works better, not because somebody thinks it's cool.
Style and good design are not the same thing. Style changes every week. Good design is timeless.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The gMini400 is very cool, no question. To be fair, though, the list price of the gMini400 is $399, only $100 less than the iPod (yes, you can find iPods for less than list price, too), and the iPod actually has longer battery life (15 hours compared to 10), besides having twice the disk space. The gMini400 may be right for you, but the iPod is hardly a bad deal.
My problem with alot of these alternative devices is their use of buttons to access your music library.
It's simply way too slow and clunky of a method for scrolling through long lists. That's why a wheel or something of the sort is absolutely necessary.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Uh, color LCD the major power drain? Compared to the HD? If you play video, the HD is constantly spinning. If you play music (or are viewing photos) the HD fills the buffer then spins down. Rinse and repeat.
Also judging by the tech specs (and perhaps deductive reasoning) the HD is spinning down less for slideshows (buffer is filled faster by photos and music). Battery life for slideshows is 5 continuous hours. Battery life for music playback is 15 hours.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
As an Apple shareholder and happy owner of some Apple products, all I can say is: Thank God Slashdot members don't run Apple.
Every time Apple introduces a new product, there is an endless series of posts about why it sucks, why it won't sell, what features were left out, why the new features are worthless, why it's too expensive, lists of poorly selling products that are "superior" and have more features and on and on and on.
Apple's revenues are up, their profits are up, they have a slew of successful products and they have a lot of happy customers.
Give it a rest guys. Let the market decide if the latest offering sucks. Based on history, when Slashdotters say an Apple product won't sell, it ends up being a phenomenal success.
Also, the article you mention is from someone that does NOT want to be recogonized by their iPod.. I would guess that's the minority.
I think the point is that fashion accessory or not, they're already passe in a lot of areas.
I live in NYC too and I agree with the OP; iPods are a dime a dozen around here. You end up looking more like a conformist walking around with one than anything else.
Which doesn't say anything about the quality of the device. It just says that this argument that people buy them to be "cool" doesn't really wash anymore, at least not in areas of the country where "cool" seems to even mean anything. (I'd imagine iPods are as ubiquitous in pretty much every large, cosmopolitan city these days.)
It's the same phenomenon as the cel phone. For the first few years they were expensive and exotic; if you had one, you showed it off. But at first, it was mainly a product for the elite. Eventually the prices came down to where at least the upper middle class could finally afford them, and Motorola's Startac both gave the cool kids a phone they could show off while simultaneously making cel phones a commodity. Nowadays, are you at all impressed whenever anybody whips out their shiny new clamshell phone? I'm not, and I doubt most people are - if anything you're probably annoyed at being bothered by the ringer or by the yapping going on next to you.
Apple's doing the same thing with the iPod. We've progressed past the point where iPods are considered "cool"; we're now to the point where they're almost boring, and are well on our way to the point where just seeing that white earbud cord looks pretentious and stupid.
I don't know if the whole mp3 player thing will play out exactly the way the cel phone thing did, but it's a pretty common pattern in technology - a product is invented, one company comes in and popularizes it with the kids, inadvertantly commoditizes it at the same time, and eventually loses market share as the whole category becomes passe and competitors take advantage.
This is obviously what Sony's counting on, and honestly, now that Sony's supporting mp3 natively (or said they're going to, at least), I'd probably rather have one of their somewhat more anonymous-looking Network Walkmans than an iPod. I don't think this stranglehold Apple has on the market is going to continue forever; somebody's just got to design a better product first. I don't think the iPod "brand" is as strong as Apple thinks it is, especially now that it's no longer as hip as it once was - their success right now is based on the fact that they've still got the product with the best combination of size, shape, and ease of use (though others may excel in one particular area, such as battery life, Apple's at least "pretty good" in all of them).
This U2 iPod's going to be a big dud. Pre-load it with all of their music for $350, then you've got something. But $50 off a $150 purchase, and it's $50 more expensive? Am I understanding that right? So in the end, you're basically just paying for a 20GB iPod, and the "box set" is another $100. How is this a good deal?
Photo iPod, also a dud. If you want to transport your photos around, you can do it just on your regular iPod (for like half the price). Who really wants to pay extra so they can look at photos on that tiny little screen? I may as well just carry my digital camera around and leave them all on that.
The regular iPods will continue being the bread and butter for the iPod line.
What's the screen size of this new iPod versus photos that people carry in their wallets? Or in their purses?
:(
Yes, the iPod would be smaller. But it'd be more convenient, and easier to show *many* photos to someone.
Personally, I like it. I think it's a good idea. Even with the color screen it's battery will last longer then my 3G.
If only the price weren't so damned steep for the color 60GB....
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I would have to disagree with your assessment of the iPod Photo. First of all, the regular iPod is only $100 cheaper than the iPod Photo, not "half the price." Secondly, you can look at photos on any television, not just on the iPod screen. Thirdly, if your digital camera holds 25,000 photos, I'm sure the memory card alone cost a lot more than $100. And I'm sure your digital camera doesn't automatically sync with your latest pictures, doesn't allow you to make custom albums, doesn't allow you to output slideshows with music, and so on. Say what you want about wanting to save money, but for people who want to carry lots of pictures around with them, paying $100 more is very, very reasonable. And that doesn't even count the full-color album artwork, a clearer screen, and the various other perks of a color iPod.
Museums and galleries have already been using regular iPods as tour guides, example, so with a color screen to display the artwork at the same time, this seems a natural fit.