The thing that blew me away the most is that the “iPod touch” has Wi-Fi web browsing using the same Safari browser found in the iPhone. And it has other iPhone features like the touch interface, the YouTube browser, and Cover Flow (the last of which has also been ported to the “iPod classic,” as it’s now called, and the iPod nano).

It has just about everything the iPhone has except the phone functionality. Which would work for me, since I already have an existing cellphone and cellular plan. However, public Wi-Fi is pretty scarce where I live, and of course I wouldn’t be able to browse the Internet with AT&T’s EDGE network.

One more gripe about the iPod touch: its maximum storage space of 16 GB looks wimpy compared to the cheaper iPod classic’s 160 GB. I know, I know, it’s because it has flash memory, but would it really be worth it to get an iPod that’s more expensive and has one tenth the storage space of another iPod? I guess those iPod touch features come at a high premium.

But still, if I were to get a new iPod, it would probably, just barely, be the iPod touch. 16 gigs would be a tight fit for my music, photos, videos, and podcasts, but it sure would be nice to be able to browse the web, assuming I could find a hotspot.

And plus, the iPod touch is just cool.

After all, the iPhone does have a lot of limitations. As Wikipedia puts it:

iPhone lacks a number of common handheld features, including voice dialing, voice recording, instant messaging, memory card slot, MMS, A2DP (stereo bluetooth), common Bluetooth file transfer, GPS capability, text copy and paste, native games, and support for MP3 files as ringtones.

So what’s the reason?

Although the iPhone lacks much functionality, what the iPhone does do it does really, really well. The iPhone lacks many features common to other phones, but its feature set is sufficient for most people, and most importantly, it implements those features in a superior fashion.

Every product or feature has two conceptual components: the idea, and the implementation of the idea. Other phones may already have the same ideas, but with the iPhone Apple has really nailed the implementation.

And of course, Apple has done a fantastic job marketing this thing. They actually haven’t done a lot of marketing. Instead, they’ve used the consumer base to market the product for them. Everyone was talking about the iPhone. The media. Blogs. Podcasts. The iPhone was the coolest thing ever before it was even released. And as the release date approached, Apple leaked out additional details to keep the excitement going.

The whole campaign was very well done. The campaign was so successful, however, that in my opinion it does raise some concerns about society’s inordinate excitement about “stuff.”

But from a marketing standpoint, Apple has done a great job with the iPhone, even though the product itself isn’t the greatest. Though when a product has as many positive aspects as the iPhone, one is more likely to forgive or overlook the negative aspects.

What would be interesting to see is a technology product that is as close to perfect as possible in both the idea and the implementation, with a great feature set, great implementation of that feature set, and great marketing of that feature set. Who knows? Maybe in the future it’ll be something even more trivial than a cellphone.

So yes, this is only a 5% discount, but I thought this was of note because I’ve rarely seen iPods below the standard retail price. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the iPhone announcement had something to do with it, considering the recent buzz about how it might impact iPod sales.

Cisco Systems sued Apple today [January 10, 2007] to prevent it from using the name iPhone for the new smart phone that it introduced yesterday at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.
[...]
The name iPhone is a registered trademark of Linksys, a division of Cisco. Linksys picked up the iPhone name when it bought a company called Infogear Technology in 2000. Cisco’s iPhones are telephone handsets designed for use on a VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) network.
[...]
Apple and Cisco have been in negotiations for about two years over Apple’s desire to license the iPhone trademark, according to Cisco spokesman John Noh. When Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld, Cisco had not yet received a signed trademark licensing agreement from Apple, though the two companies had been negotiating terms as recently as last Monday night.
[...]
In an interview Wednesday afternoon, Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of worldwide iPod marketing, pointed out that Cisco’s iPhone brand applies to a line of voice-over-IP products, whereas Apple’s iPhone is a cell phone. “They’re different products,” Joswiak said.

“Yeah, but they’re both phones,” is what I have to say to that. Cisco seems to agree:

“Today’s iPhone is not tomorrow’s iPhone. The potential for convergence of the home phone, cell phone, work phone, and PC is limitless, which is why it is so important for us to protect our brand,” Chandler [senior vice president and general counsel for Cisco] said.

Cisco seems to be pretty upset, but I’m sure they’re loving this publicity for their product!

Apple TV has found a web home under the “iPod + iTunes” category of the Apple website. From the Apple TV homepage:

Say you’ve just downloaded Cars from iTunes. Instead of huddling around your computer to watch, you pop some popcorn while your computer wirelessly syncs your new flick to Apple TV. [...] Apple TV connects to your TV via an HDMI port or component video and audio ports. Its built-in, superfast 802.11 wireless capability syncs your iTunes library to any Mac or PC in the house.

I think this is a really cool thing, even more so because it works with PCs, meaning us Windows users aren’t left out. I think this will also be really neat for podcasters in particular, as Apple TV users will be able to watch video podcasts from their televisions. Now how cool will that be?

The Mac OS X-based iPhone is most akin to an iPod in design, but allows users to listen to music, make phone calls, send text messages and e-mail, surf the Web, and take and upload photos, all using a wide touch screen and a single button. Apple plans to make the device available in the United States in June, with a 4GB model going for $499 with a two-year service contract, and an 8GB model with the same contract for $599.

My thoughts:

For one, it seems very expensive (as seems to be typical with quite a few Apple products). Though I’m guessing the price will likely decrease as time goes on.

Second, I’m not sure if dropping the keyboard is such a good idea. I understand there’s some sort of touch-screen equivalent, but I’m not clear on how that’ll work.

The iPhone does have a lot of the “cool factor” though: for example, it has a sensor that detects when you hold the iPhone up to your ear and turns off the touch screen, turns off any music, and switches the iPhone to calling mode.

Very cool, but I have a few questions: How does that work anyway? Is it simply a proximity sensor? Does this sensor use radiation that might revive the cellphone radiation concerns? And what do you call this feature anyway? I vote for “sonear” (that is, “sonar” with an “e” in just the right spot).

So in summary, the iPhone is cool … but it’s way beyond my budget.

We start off in 1994 in the browser world and 2004 in the podcasting world. At these times there existed Mosaic and iPodder, respectively. Mosaic later changed its name to Netscape because of legal disputes. In the same way, iPodder later changed its name to Juice because of legal disputes concerning the iPod trademarks.

Anyway, in the beginning both iPodder and Netscape were dominant. Everyone used them. Even though the user interfaces weren’t the greatest. I mean, you can’t even listen to podcasts from within iPodder, and to me Netscape’s interface looks really ugly. But who didn’t use iPodder for podcatching, and who didn’t use Netscape for Internet browsing?

Yes, there were some other programs. iPodderX (now Transistr) was the Opera of the podcatcher world. Both were commercial programs and both had a much smaller user base.

Then one day in June 2005, Apple became Microsoft. Just as Internet Explorer usage shot up after Microsoft bundled it into Windows in 1997, so did iTunes usage as a podcatcher shoot up after Apple incorporated podcatching into that program.

Why did this happen? The simple answer for both cases: hardware. Microsoft Windows could be used on the prevalent PC. iTunes was used with the iPod. Bundle IE with the popular Windows, and IE’s share skyrockets. Bundle podcatching with the popular iTunes, and up shoots iTunes usage for podcatching.

Now we’re in 1998 in the browser world, and late 2005 in the podcatching world. Who uses iPodder and Netscape anymore? iTunes and Internet Explorer have taken over.

iPodder development has branched off into other projects, such as the PodNova client. Netscape development had branched off into other projects, such as Nvu, the Mozilla Suite, and SeaMonkey.

We arrive at the year 2004 in the browser world and 2006 in the podcatching world. Firefox, a descendant of Netscape, has come on the scene, quickly eating away at Internet Explorer usage share. Now almost everyone’s talking about Firefox, and Microsoft has responded by kicking IE up a notch with the upcoming release of version 7.

But where’s the podcatcher that will become the next Firefox?

As I was thinking about this browser/podcatcher war coincidence, I was surprised at how my plans to build a podcatcher coincided with this repeating history. I was planning to make a podcatcher, which is currently codenamed “Salamander.” Hmm, an animal name, kinda like Firefox and Firebird. I wanted Salamander to be easy to use while having really cool features. Hmm, kinda like Firefox. I wanted Salamander to be the program that would eat away at the usage share of the dominating program (iTunes). Hmm, kinda like Firefox.

Will Salamander become the next Firefox? Time will tell. One little difference, though. Salamander does not have its roots in iPodder, in the way that Firefox has its roots in Netscape.

Oh, and iPodder did not start out as a paid program in the way Netscape did.

But besides those things and few other small differences, the history of 10 years ago has indeed repeated itself. And it just might continue to do so.

Paul Thurrott (author of SuperSite for Windows articles) gave an interesting an opinion on why Apple would do this:

One might wonder why Apple would create such a thing. After all, with barely 2 percent of the market for computer operating systems, should Apple be trying to win market share for Mac OS X and not offer a way for Mac users to run Windows? Not exactly. Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn’t actually make a lot of money directly from sales of its OS. Instead, Apple makes most of its money–even now, in the heady days of iPod supremacy–by selling computer hardware. So one might think of Boot Camp as a win-win. Apple wins because a much wider audience of users can now consider its Mac systems, secure in the knowledge that they can run Windows if they want to. Microsoft wins because these users will still be using–and paying for–Windows. And best of all, we as users win, too, because now we can have the best of both worlds: the elegance of Apple hardware coupled with Windows, the operating system that runs all those applications we want to run.

Some Mac users don’t see it that way. They’d like you to believe that Mac OS X is all anyone would ever need, and they’re actually quite a bit distressed that anyone would want to run Windows on a Mac. Get a life: This software will open up the world of Apple to a much wider audience and if OS X is as great as they think it is, surely some of those people will start spending time with OS X instead of Windows. I can’t really see the issue there.

The review also said that:

A future version of Boot Camp will be included with Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard,” due in late 2007. That version, presumably, will support Windows Vista as well.

I do daresay that I’m actually getting somewhat excited about this. I’ve never wanted to switch from Windows because it is, as I consider it, the ultimate progamming platform. With a dual-boot setup like this, I could still do programming etcetera on Windows and then doodle with Mac OS X if I ever wanted to. Hmm…

Now that Vatican Radio offers podcasts in eight different languages, the pope has the technological capability to plug in and import the radio’s audio files.

[...]

Though the white iPod nano is tiny, it still made an impression on the pope. When the head of the radio’s technical and computer support department, Mauro Milita, identified himself and handed the pope the boxed iPod, the pope was said to have replied, “Computer technology is the future.”

The pope’s new 2-gigabyte digital audio player already was loaded with a sampling of the radio’s programming in English, Italian and German and musical compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Frederic Chopin, Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky and Igor Stravinsky. The stainless steel back was engraved with the words “To His Holiness, Benedict XVI” in Italian.