Pod's Progress
The Age
Thursday July 20, 2006
Garry Barker looks at rumours of a rival and what's in store for the iPod.
IF I were an iPod I would buy an armoured car, hire some thugs to guard my body and wear bulletproof jocks.Everyone wants to kill the iPod, turn iTunes into a swamp and generally mess up one of the most successful digital devices ever invented.The reason is obvious: iPods are cool and they store and play music, which may be the principal reasons that people buy them. But they do a lot more than that, becoming, if they are properly set up and synchronised with one's Macintosh, handy portable repositories of much more than Bono's most recent money-spinner.Microsoft, facing broad-based competition from the Google juggernaut and flattening of the market for Windows, is tilling new fields, working on, among several devices, a portable player touted by Windows warriors as an iPod killer.US website enGadget (tinyurl.com/qc6wd) last week published photographs of the device, code-named Project Argo. It comes out of a sort of special projects unit at Microsoft headquarters headed by J.Allard, the co-founder of the Xbox, and is said to be part of the development of the much-rumoured Xbox2Go. Microsoft's Argo device looks like an iPod and has a 4:3 ratio screen of about 10cm diagonal above what looks suspiciously like an Apple-type scroll wheel, with two buttons either side. It is probably not a scroll wheel; more like the switch button on the face of an iPod shuffle.Engadget says: "It's becoming increasingly clear that Redmond has a definite battle plan for waging war against Apple and others in your living room (and pocket), and that the company is starting to make good on its promise of turning the (Xbox) 360 into a true digital hub."Microsoft has a long way to go to catch up with the iPod and to try to match the iTunes jukebox that is a large part of the iPod's success.Meanwhile, Apple is making inroads into the Wintel market, especially with the new MacBooks, but also with the Intel-equipped Mac minis and iMacs (with the recent edition of an education-oriented model replacing the eMac). And, without much doubt it has new iPods on the ramp ready to roll, including, so the rumours say, wireless capability.An oft-quoted analyst with US investment firm Piper Jaffray, Gene Munster, believes Apple will counter Microsoft's "iPod killer" with a wireless model. "Wireless functionality is an obvious next step," he said in a note to investors, adding it could be expected about September.But, he said, "we do not believe (the Microsoft entry) will be a worthy opponent for the iPod".But will the new iPods have WiFi for connecting to the internet or even become mobile phones? Competition is certainly coming from all the phone makers as they move to produce devices that are in fact personal mobile terminals.Our world is soaked in radio waves as mobile phones take over from landlines. WiFi now appears in every second coffee shop and hotel lobby, Bluetooth connects your head to the phone on your belt, the PDA in your pocket and the keyboard to your computer. Music is a big element in mobility. Motorola licensed iTunes several years ago, Nokia has phones with 4GB and more music storage capacity, as well as FM radio tuners, and others are following suit. TV programs for the mini-screen are also increasing.Some speculate that the next-model iPod will have a screen covering the whole face of the device - a diagonal of about 13cm - with on-screen touch controls and perhaps even a phone. The phone angle is not impossible, not least because Apple apparently has a good relationship with Cingular, one of the two largest mobile phone networks in the US, but a move into the mobile phone sphere would be an act of singular courage.At the moment, downloading music over the phone is slow and expensive. Most of the 3 million or so iPods sold every month get their music ripped in from CDs, which is cheaper and quicker. That said, download sales are rising and now probably represent about 15 per cent of all music sold by the big labels.Sooner or later - and maybe not for a while in Australia where wireless prices are still relatively high - we will be living in a wireless world downloading tunes, streaming video and generally being connected all the time, anywhere we are.To that daunting note may I add that to retain sanity one can always turn the damned thing off.-- blogs.theage.com.au/barkersbyteMacfileThe next big revision of Mac OS X, 10.5, aka Leopard, will be partially unveiled to Macintosh professionals at the annual Worldwide Developers' Conference scheduled to open in San Francisco's Moscone Centre on August 7. Interest is huge and a large delegation is booked to go from Australia. Apple has said Leopard will include a finished version of Boot Camp, the application Apple built to allow Windows to run on Intel Macs. It has just released an update, Boot Camp 1.0.2, which is still in development but available for download from apple.com or macupdate.com (tinyurl.com/jd3bu). No new notes have been included with the update. Macupdate says the installer may have been improved or some of the Windows drivers updated. But Apple is also giving directions to Parallels, with which apparently anything short of an old Al Jolson record - any version of Windows, including 3.11 and Linux - can be run on a MacBook. Thus one might speculate that Apple might offer to buy Parallels and leave off development of BootCamp. Other Leopard features expected include, according to the Ars Technica website (arstechnica.com), support for multiple desktops, integration of iCal and Address Book into a single application, resolution scaling and possibly a new Finder.Leopard is expected on shelves either late December or early January. The conference is also expected to preview the first new professional tower Macs fitted with, so Ars Technica suggests, the latest Intel Xeon dual-core chips, dubbed Woodcrest, and will possibly show the first Intel Xserve.
© 2006 The Age
