Apple iPod division head: iPod and mobile phones best left separate

“In an interview with the German daily Berliner Zeitung on Monday, Apple vice president and iPod division head Jon Rubenstein expressed his feelings on the convergence of music devices and cell phones, saying the devices are best left separate,” Ed Oswald reports for BetaNews. “The remarks were published the same day Motorola CEO Ed Zander was criticized in the media over his ‘Screw the nano’ statement made at a leadership conference in California on Friday. The recent comments made by either side — whether a joke or not — emphasize just how tenuous the Apple-Motorola relationship may be.”

“‘Is there a toaster that also knows how to brew coffee? There is no such combined device, because it would not make anything better than an individual toaster or coffee machine,’ Rubenstein argued. ‘It works the same way with the iPod, the digital camera or mobile phone: it is important to have specialized devices,'” Oswald reports.

Full article here.
This isn’t about toasters and coffee. This is about two devices that many people carry around all day long. Anyone can look at an iPod nano and any of today’s tiny cell phones and imagine them as one unit. Physical size isn’t an issue. Storage space isn’t an issue. Even battery life isn’t that much of an issue. It can be done and it will be done, but it would take a company like Apple to do it well. As we’ve said before, make a phone that accepts or clips onto an iPod nano and, presto, you have two devices that can be one for those that want one. Also, you can sell them separately.

The “Apple iPhone” as an iPod accessory would work best. When the two are married, the screen and battery (all or some of the power) come from the iPod and the phone necessities (buttons, internals) are in the “iPhone” unit that the iPod slips into or that slips onto the iPod. Perhaps the iPhone doesn’t even work without an iPod. There are many ways to approach this and, like Jobs’ initial comments that putting an iMac behind a screen wasn’t the best solution and then later debuting the iMac G5, we hope Apple’s just diverting competitors’ attention while working hard on ideas.

If you don’t want an iPhone for your iPod, don’t buy one; just like people who don’t want or need their iPod to record voices don’t buy add-on voice recorders. But, we bet there are many, many of the tens of millions of iPod users who’d love to buy an Apple iPhone to add important functionality to their iPod and only have to lug around one (okay, a “unified”) device instead of two.

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