Apple iPhone Nano: Impending Introduction?

Considering my recurring coverage of Apple, you might be surprised that I haven’t yet mentioned last Wednesday’s multi-product introduction. I’ve been swamped with other projects, for one thing, and I also didn’t personally attend Apple’s intro event. However, I’ve followed both Apple’s press releases and others’ coverage, and (perhaps not surprisingly) I do have some thoughts:

• Is it just me, or does anyone else also find it ironic that after ranting about content providers’ claimed greed both with respect to music and video, Apple’s got no compunction about charging customers 99 cents to make an up-to-30-second ringtone based on a track they’ve already bought for 99 cents?
• I’m intrigued about the iPhone and iPod touch’s support for direct purchase and download of tracks from the iTunes Store over Wi-Fi. Then again, considering my negative analysis of Zune’s limited wireless capabilities, followed by a more upbeat critique of Sansa Connect’s (still incomplete) Wi-Fi faculties, this probably isn’t surprising to you. The ‘devil’s in the details’, however…I’m very curious to see how responsive the service will be (both at Starbucks and over generic 802.11 connections), as well as how easy it’ll be to search through the voluminous iTunes Store archive and quickly find the exact content you want via the units’ small screens.
• I’m not at all surprised at the introduction of the ‘iPhone Lite’ aka the iPod touch. Although simplistically you can think of it as an iPhone without the phone, there are other omissions: no camera, microphone, speaker, Bluetooth (although given its no-AD2P nature on the iPhone, this isn’t much of a loss), email client, Maps application, Stock and Weather widgets, etc. Expect a feature-by-feature analysis of the iPod touch versus Nokia’s N770 and N800 Internet Tablets on Brian’s Brain in the near future.
• Conversely, I am a bit surprised to see that Apple further extended its HDD-based iPod line with the new 80 GByte and 160 GByte classics. Apparently, Apple feels there’s still a large-enough market out there of folks with music and (particularly) video libraries too large to cost-effectively fit in flash memory. With that said, I note that the flash memory-based iPod touch comes in capacities as large as 16 Gbytes…I’m going out on a limb here and predicting that the 160 GByte iPod classic is the end of the line for Apple’s HDD-based products. For more on flash memory-vs-HDD, see my feature article coming later this month in EDN.

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