There’s only hours to go before Steve Jobs strides across the stage at Macworld to deliver his highly anticipated keynote. If an iPod phone is truly on the way, Cingular could well reprise the role of network provider it played when the ROKR appeared on the scene.

Like many of you, I’m hoping that an iPod phone emerges, so we can see, and hopefully savor, the results. If it manages to dramatically redefine the mobile phone interface and experience, so much the better. While I like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung, Palm Treo, Pocket PC Smartphones and other phones, every sector needs the challenge of competition to keep on refining and redefining their own products to deliver better experiences for humans. For us. A standout iPod phone will set the competition into high gear to likewise take the portable communications and information everywhere.

That said, if there is no iPod phone, competitors will probably breathe a sigh of relief, and redouble their efforts to improve their own existing media phones as quickly as they can to better counter the iPod phone threat when it finally comes.

If we don’t have this continual push towards better, more natural interfaces for technology, we’ll never get to the Star Trek scenario of talking to our computers and electronic devices and interacting with them in as natural a manner as possible.

The iPod phone is expected to be a Nano-esque iPod, with a mobile phone cleverly intertwined throughout the iPod interface. Will it be a candy bar phone? A flip phone? A slider? Something else entirely?

And debate rages as to whether or not the interface will be truly simple and uncomplicated, or if it will also let you take photos and video, make and receive video calls, send text/video/voice/picture messages and browse the Internet using the equivalent of Mobile Safari to combat the phone optimized mobile Internet portal just released by Yahoo, the inevitable upcoming one from Google and operators’ own mobile portals.

No-one besides Jobs and his inner circle know which phone provider they will use if the iPod phone launches. Well, people at the chosen phone company would know. There’s also the chance Apple will become an MVNO, or mobile virtual network operator. That way, they buy airtime minutes at a discount of some kind and resell them to customers.

But the Wall St Journal reports that it could be Cingular, which would rule out the MVNO strategy. Cingular provided the network service exclusively to Motorola and Apple’s ROKR E1, a candybar style phone that included iTunes software built-in.

There’s also a chance that Apple won’t launch with any carriers at all, but simply launch an iPod phone that you transfer your existing SIM card into. If it is priced similarly to the 30Gb iPod video, but with likely less than 30Gb of storage space, there’s no reason why people can’t simply go into Apple stores and buy ‘the new iPod’ which just happens to have a phone in it as well.

Just selling iPods to the public over the past 5 years has resulted in over 70m sales. Why should it be any different with an iPod phone? Unless the iPod phone was visibly a total disaster upon launch, which is highly doubtful, I’m sure I’ll be buying one in a flash even if a widescreen iPod video emerges. Having a great phone with an iPod built-in that will probably play video on its smaller screen anyway is more important to me than having a widescreen iPod.

So, let’s keep our fingers crossed that Apple does indeed launch an amazing iPod phone in a few hours time. If not, we’ll just have to wait until next time and hope the rest of Apple’s developments keep us wowed.

And for those that really want an iPod phone and can't wait, there’s always the Gear4 BluEye adapter that connects your phone to your iPod via Bluetooth and lets you see caller ID and other details on your iPod nano’s screen. It’s been available for the last couple of months but has been in short supply thanks to the holiday season.
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