Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 10 July 2007 08:22
IT Industry -
Market
Page 1 of 2
The iPod nano has been a success, and the iPhone got off to a roaring start. So how about a iPhone nano, and a full-size iPod that resembles the iPhone?
The idea of a next-gen iPod with a larger, touch-sensitive widescreen has been around for some time, and it makes a lot of sense.
The only way to increase the screen size without making the whole iPod bigger is to switch to a landscape arrangement, and the predominance of 16:9 for TV shows (and even wider formats for movies) makes widescreen a must.
Removing the scroll wheel in favour of a implementation based on a touchscreen would be the other half of the space-saving redesign. Several commentators predicted this arrangement would appear this year, but so far they've been wrong.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster's recent prediction that such an iPod will be released no later than next January's Macworld Expo is hardly shattering news. Munster is tipping a price of $US299, midway between the $US249 and $US349 tags on the current 30G and 80G models - a fairly safe guess.
Another argument put forward is that moving the high-end iPod to an iPhone-like platform would allow Apple to share the codebase between the two devices. This effectively lowers the average cost of the iPhone by greatly increasing the number of units that the development costs can be amortised over.
Despite the additional complexity, some people believe it could also reduce Apple's costs for the iPod as this would eliminate certain software components that they say Apple currently licenses from another company. Maybe, maybe not.
What about the iPhone nano? Please turn to page 2.
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