One more thing?
by Volker Weber
The new 4G iPod leaves me slightly underwhelmed. It's a good thing that they did away with the four extra buttons of the 3G version. I never longed to upgrade from Woodstock, because the 3G scheme did not appeal to me.
However the introduction of the "Music" menu hints at other things to come. Besides music, what is the next thing you would want to carry with you at all times? I am not talking about calendar, contacts and other minor things that the device does today. I believe the next move is photos.
Take the whole iPhoto library and blast it over to the iPod. You don't have DRM restrictions here, so you can make it a two-way sync. How about this scenario?
1. iPod syncs with iPhoto. Look at your photos while away from home.
2. iPod offloads pictures from camera and frees camera storage.
3. When home, iPhoto grabs new photos from iPod.
So what do we need? A dock for memory cards? Or a USB interface to camera? Do I hear Bluetooth? And of course a color screen, because B/W would be kind of dull. So I am looking for a yet another iPod soon. Maybe for 499? :-)
Comments
Having just received a 40GB iPod as a gift, I was preparing for some serious gift-recipient remorse when I hard about the 4G version. Fortunately, I can certainly live without the marginal new features (though yes, the old 4-across buttons are less than beautiful). The gift-giver, however, is none too pleased with the $100 price drop :-\
Now, when the iPod gets AirPort Express-compatible WiFi built-in...
Welcome to the club. :-)
I think twelve hrs battery life instead of eight is quite an improvement. Otherwise most of the features are firmware-based and could probably have been brought to the 3G iPods as well...
The photo idea is probably the right guess. But so far a color display consumes too much energy, so that might take some time. OLED is the thing here, i suppose.
OLED? Nope. Active TFT for now. ;-)
As for energy consumption: There are plenty on non-OLED phones out there that run for days on one charge. 12 hours on a battery is quite an improvement. But I guess, there is more to the 4G machine. Supposedly it has a new architecture, that closer resembles the mini than the 3G.
And as far as the firmware is concerned, there are hardly any features on the 3G that would not work on the 2G. Still Apple chose to not implement them. They were only adding things they needed for the iTunes store. I would not hold my breath waiting for 4G features in the 3G.
Hey, stop beating up on the 3G iPods; I have one and I don't mind the 4 buttons across the top. :-)
There has been a rumour floating around that there are "hidden" features in the 4G iPod that have yet to be revealed. {link} But I will believe it when I see it.
Like everyone else, I see no need to upgrade.
Theres a 4 pin connector in the top of the 4G ipod. its a strange connector i have not seen before. It is next to the headphone socket. Any ideas anyone? Video output? :)
That was in the 3G as well. Remote control port.
OK, it's bulky and and an external device, but the Belkin Digital Camera Link already does the trick of uploading photos to the iPod. I' was considering that solution for me (to be honest: justifing to buy an iPod ...).
Upps, missed a link to the Belkin device: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1619203,00.asp
True. But you can't look at the pictures and it does not sync with iPhoto. That would be a "good enough for PCs" solution. It uses the iPod as a dumb hard disk.
