Life Pods

The Age

Thursday August 3, 2006

Garry Barker

Will digital cameras become a new iPod feature, Garry Barker wonders.

LAST week Livewire colleague Terry Lane talked to iMug (the Melbourne Macintosh Users' Group) about trends in digital camera technology and made a forecast that the next big wave of innovation will be in mobile phone cameras.

Companies such as Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson are already the biggest digital camera makers on the planet, which is perhaps not as surprising as knowing that General Motors is, or was, the world's largest maker of computers (through its Delco Remy division).

Lane was saying that innovation in big and expensive digital SLR (single lens reflex) cameras has always been slower than in $500 mass-market compact cameras, but both are likely to be put into the shade by photographic developments in mobile phones.

Probably early next year, we will begin to see mobile phone handsets with truly capable cameras - urged on by Telstra, which will have launched its 850 mHz nationwide high-speed wireless broadband network that is already three-quarters finished.

Remember three or four years ago when 1-megapixel cameras cost $900? Nokia has a phone with a 3.2-megapixel camera, as does Sony Ericsson. Samsung will soon release (in Korea but not here) a 7-megapixel camera and says it will soon release a 10-megapixel unit.

Measured on megapixels alone, those numbers challenge even some SLRs. My Canon 300D, for instance, has 6.3-megapixel resolution but - and this produces the big difference in quality - vastly superior optics to those found in phones.

That may change as new lens technologies emerge. Terry Lane spoke of an electronic lens made of oil and water layers held in a transparent plastic "lozenge" that could be zoomed by applying an electrical charge.

The point of all this is that although it has been widely suggested that Apple will produce an iPod with a phone module and wireless capability, nobody has postulated that it might also carry a nice 5-megapixel camera.

About 5-megapixels and a reasonably good lens would produce results that could easily satisfy the iPod generation.

And what if it could take short video clips and run them into iTunes for sharing around the planet or including in a podcast?

Imagine the scene: there are the cool ones, rocking along, their feet controlled by the Dandy Warhols and Wolfmother, snapping pictures they can store or, by ducking into a digital photo kiosk, either print or send to the person they hope to blackmail for having been seen up close and personal with someone other than the mother of their children. (Surely no iPod user would stoop so low.)

Microsoft's new Zune MP3 player, which has hjts been announced and is expected later this year, may or may not change the iPod landscape. Personally, I doubt it. The iPod has social status and iTunes Music Store has 80-odd per cent of the downloaded music market, which is set to overtake CD sales.

Apple is several years into iPod development and clearly has innovations it has not yet talked about - maybe including the mobile phone the rumour sites are chewing over.

Could Microsoft replicate iTunes Music Store? It has the money to promote it, it could forge deals with the record companies (which seem to like money more than music), but with nearly 60 million iPods sold since they were introduced in October 2001, they would need something very compelling to take a viable chunk of a fairly established market.

Apple has the name, and although it went through a bad patch of heavy criticism about its response to customers with problems, that now seems to have been polished up.

Nor is the story any longer just about music. The iPod is now a video, movie and TV player as Hollywood gallops to get movies and television programs into iTunes.

And that doesn't take into account its potential in education and as a data storage unit.

Zune will have to compete in all those areas to get a foothold.

Microsoft has said its offering will be a closed system, a la iTunes, and it will surely be racing to overtake Apple in tying up movie rights for the mini screen. But how will "open" MP3 and MPEG4 music and video providers such as BigPond, ninemsn and Yahoo! then fare?

Microsoft has said Zune will have WiFi capability, which may hasten Apple's announcement of a similar feature in the iPods it may preview at the developers' conference next week.

Consumers have yet to be convinced about the need for wireless downloads, and, certainly in Australia, much will depend on how Telstra sets charges for larger files carried through its mobile and wireless broadband networks. The lower the fee, the higher the traffic.

As for the Creative and iRiver MP3 players, well, has anyone got the sheet music for the Dead March from Handel's Saul? I reckon we could start rehearsing about now.

blogs.theage.com.au/barkersbyte

Macfile

Don't tell Telstra boss Sol Trujillo, but we've all got Skype and we're making "free" phone calls all over the world. Never before have we felt so pleased about getting something for free from Telstra. And now we have Skype with video. It was released for the Windows platform some time ago and is now available for Mac OS X. You need broadband - or what passes for broadband in country. The application allows video calls to any other similarly equipped computer - Mac, Windows or Linux - so that, as the Skype blurb says: "You can smile, wave, laugh or pull funny faces with anyone, anywhere in the world, for free."

Find the download at tinyurl.com/s28hu. It is still in development, so don't blame Skype if it crashes your Mac, but on our short acquaintance it looks stable. The application is Universal Binary and will run on the new Intel Macs as well as G4 (minimum 800 MHz) and G5 machines. You need Mac OS X 10.3.0 (Panther) or later, at least 512MB of RAM, 40MB of free disk space and an iSight camera, which incudes a microphone. Other cameras recommended by Skype are the Philips SPC900NC and the Logitech QuickCam Pro 400.

? Apple has released the Bluetooth wireless version of the multi-buttoned Mighty Mouse. It has a new laser tracking engine, said to be 20 times more sensitive than standard optical mice. It is available from Apple dealers and the online store for $109.

© 2006 The Age

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