Video iPod

For the past week, everyone is talking about new iPod. Newspaper said many people will die for this thing because of its low price and video capability. But to me, I think it's just an intermediate product from Apple. Given there are already few PMP supporting 640x480 screen, having good support for DivX and Xvid, I can only see the video support in iPod just as a bonus instead of a great feature for main use.

The battery leads to great disappointment too. The official spec. states the 30G version lasts for 2 hours while the 60G lasts for 3 hours in video playback. Not to mention it probably assumes a fully charged and healthy battery condition.

If video support in iPod needs to be as attractive as music support, I think at least the following features need to be found in future iPod generation:

• Great battery life for video playback (> 10 hrs)
  
• Direct support for DivX and Xvid codecs alike. rmvb support would be great too (just dreaming.)
  
• Bigger screen

Bigger screen could be difficult to design, in order to retain the original iPod style and click wheel. But after I saw iRiver U10, Apple should be able to come up with a better idea on their own.

Some rumors say Apple is actively developing a Wi-Fi enabled iPod, with builtin mobile Safari for browsing and even buying tunes in ITS. No matter this rumor is true or not, but network enabled iPod is really a great feature that I personally die for long time ago. Imagine you can listen to Internet radio in public places where WiFi is available. At home, you can stream your bigger music collection from iTunes to your iPod similar to Airport Express. And best of all, we will probably have WiFi headphones to free ourselves from cable. I remember Jobs once thought Bluetooth can't deliver good quality music wirelessly to hp. But I strongly believe WiFi can make this come true. Besides, a builtin mobile Safari means a brand new portable device experience just like PSP does. Besides usual web browsing, I know PSP can now even do remote control through VNC, may be iPod can do similar thing to control your Mac remotely? OK, I know it's already too far away.

How about a Dashboard widget style of APIs for iPod? Imagine all cool things you can do with widgets now can easily ported to iPod. Hmm...

Back to real. Right now, the new Zen Vision would definitely be a better choice for PMP than iPod. Let's see which direction Apple will go in their next step in iPod.