New iPods on a road to nowhere?

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 13 September 2006 18:54

Opinion and Analysis

While the Apple event yesterday held much promise and on some levels delivered with the unveiling of iTV, the long awaited rollout of the new iPod Nano range unfortunately took a little gloss off the show. Far from being a show stopper, the new range was a bit of a disappointment. 

• Announcements

More memory, a slightly revamped look, new scratch resistant casing is all good stuff but not in the wow category.

Perhaps Apple believes that because it has the iTunes and iPod market locked in with nearly 60 million iPods and more than 1.5 billion downloads, that it can afford to be complacent. Or perhaps because it is because numerous attempts to unseat the Nano with fancy devices equipped with FM, digital cameras and other alluring features have fallen flat on their face.

Whatever the reason, even with the arrival of Microsoft's Zune on the horizon, Apple obviously does not believe there is a need just yet to give a market supposedly hungry for features like wireless communications, FM radio and even mobile telephony what it supposedly wants.

Of course, there will be slight changes in the design, improvements to the case and definitely more memory. After all, having more memory encourages people to download and store more music.

Perhaps an FM radio, on the other hand, may discourage downloads. Who needs so much stored iTunes music when you can listen to the radio?

Wireless connectivity? Would groups of friends each with their own Zune, really congregate in wireless hotspots and listen to the same songs together? Microsoft seems to think so but Apple appears to be unconvinced.

As far as Apple is concerned, as long as it can continue to sell 8 million plus iPods a quarter, the iPod Nano will remain a music player and nothing else. From a business point of view, who can blame them?