New iPods on the Horizon
RemovableBait writes "Apple Computer plans to introduce more iPods before the end of the year", a company executive said Tuesday. From the article: Executive Vice President Tim Cook didn't say whether the new iPods will come at a press event Apple has scheduled for Wednesday morning. But during a conference call with analysts, he suggested that the iPod Nano won't be the last new iPod of the year."
Shuffle (512MB or 1024MB)
Nano (2GB or 4GB)
Normal (20GB or 60GB)
3 types, 2 size choices for each, with a nice $50 price difference for each model.
I think Apple are really good when it comes to coming up with a product lineup. It's other suppliers that are too confusing.
-- The doctor said I wouldn't get so many nose bleeds if I just kept my finger out of there!
It's not about the resolution, it's about the compression.
With h.264 even HD files can be compressed to a manageable size. With iPod's large storage capacity one could easily carry half a dozen movies on it.
With a video out, all you'd need is a TV to plug it in.
The problems are, and I have no idea if they have been solved:
-the battery life for outputting a movie
-is the iPod beefy enough for h.264 decoding? (Possibly, through a dedicated hardware chip)
Here's a good real-world explanation of h.264 and what it can do for HD.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Maybe not indestructible, but they're already pretty damn tough http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nano.ars/3
What sort of length are we talking about? You can get 4 hours of video onto a DVD of 4.7GB (of a quality that you couldn't get better than on your typical household TV. If you have a fantastic plasma screen you may notice an improvement at 3 hours/DVD). So a 60GB iPod would hold about 2000 songs and 40 hours of DVD quality video. I'm sure they will be releasing larger hard drives at some point, this isn't going to require a fundamental overhaul.