jholzner said:
What boat will they miss? The one where those type of devices are a misserable failure? No one wants to watch video on a tiny screen...and besides...what video would you watch? Tiny quicktime movies? A movie ripped from dvd would fill the ipod up in no time.
No one wants to watch video on a tiny screen.
No one. You're pretty confident in saying that. So not one single portable video player has ever been sold then, because nobody wants one, right?
My friend has an Archos, that has a screen at least 1/3 smaller than the iPod's screen, and you could still enjoy watching video on the thing. Not the best video viewing device in the entire world, but if I'm on a trane, or a plane, or riding in a car, and I want to watch something, it's much better than nothing. The iPod's screen size is big enough that you could have a decent time watching video on it.
I think battery life certainly needs fixing. When I was still living in Japan, I could easily have gone through 7-8 hours of music while riding the trains and walking around doing whatnot.
If it can be implemented without having a negative effect on performance in any other way, so the "I don't want that feature!" people don't sit around bitching, add in the ability to play video through the dock off of the iPod's hard drive. Only problem is, it would then need a remote to really be useful.
The wild idea I'd love to see is to build in wi-fi ability, and then voila- you have your remote control for iTunes when playing music via AirPort Extreme. Browse your entire music iTunes music library from your iPod, pause, next track, previous track, track scrub, volume control, it's all there. You'd be using short bursts of wi-fi, and wouldn't be touching the hard drive at all, so it wouldn't be a huge battery hog.
Is the iPod first and foremost a music playing device? Of course. But some of you are just ridiculous in your "that's all it should do for God's sake!!" whining. If Apple can integrate new features into the iPod without taking anything away from what it already is, why not add new stuff? If you want to be such purists, and proclaim that the iPod should only be a music player, guess what? Toss out the ability to use it as an external hard drive. Toss out the contacts. Toss out the games. Toss out the ability to read text files. Toss out the alarm clock. Toss out the calendar. After all, none of those things have anything to do with playing your MP3s!
Steve Jobs himself has said that the iPod is basically Apple's new handheld computer. If new features come, and the ruin the iPod's ability to play music, THEN start bitching. Otherwise, quiet down, and let those of us who want our iPods to do more ask for more.
