Macworld UK is reporting, “The micro iPod is white, and will hold 240 songs – but has no screen so will play the unlisted tracks in a set order or in random fashion. Four buttons are arranged in a square formation – two large buttons and two smaller ones.”
“Apple’s slogan for the iPod is ‘240 songs a million ways.’ Apple’s existing iPods use a small hard disk to store tracks. The new micro iPod uses flash memory such as that used in digital cameras. It is rumoured that it will be able to store 1GB of compressed AAC audio,” Macworld Uk reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: And the world wonders if this thing really is the ‘iPod micro’ or ‘iPod flash’ or whatever its name will be, if it exists, of course.
This has got to be one of the worse ideas out of Cupertino. 250 songs with no way of getting to what you want. Why bother with playlists then? And at the rumored $150 price tag, it only proves that Apple is all about the margin.
I’ve been pushing all my friends to get iPods, but they’ve been complaining about price. if this rumor holds true I won’t even tell them about this product.
Still, 240 songs X 3 minutes per song = 12 hours of music. Not bad at all!
If it has no way to show the name of the song, then it will be a miserable failure.
ade makes a good point, which might explain the conflict in the rumors. No dedicated screen because the whole thing is a screen. I saw a picture of an mp3 player shown at CES that uses this technology, so it wouldn’t be impossible for Apple to do this as well.
http://portableaudio.engadget.com/entry/1234000500026390/
Now if it doesn’t have a screen at all…
I don’t see this as being a problem that would limit sales. A person is going to buy the flash player with the idea of listening to a specific mix that was created earlier on iTunes with only the songs they want to listen to at the time. So it won’t matter what order the songs are played if the user plans on listening to most all of them anyway. Like someone mentioned earlier, many times when you are jogging or whatever, you’re not worried about selecting songs, just the occassional skipping of a song.
However, if it would be nice to setup maybe a couple playlists to select from, and I don’t know how a person would do that without a screen.
I don’t think I need to talk about ease of use.
Either way, I think this will be a huge hit with active users that want to take it too the gym or something and for people that want a complimentary iPod to add to their regular iPod.
It’s not going to be marketed toward those of you that see it as a failure. If you don’t see how something like this could possibly sell, then try to think different.
I actually think this would be a good move because it keeps Apple from just trying to sell cheap iPods. It’s actually innovative. It’s showing us another way of listening to music.
Why would I want an iPod without a screen? I hate to say it but this looks like a stupid idea from Apple.
Did the first walkman have a screen? No
How did you manage?
I will buy 3 within 2 years for my 3 kids.