After having owned an iPod for, oh, about a week now yet having been around them since late 2001 because of my friends that not only are early adopters, but tend to buy everything, I've now realized why they continued to buy new versions of the iPod and why it's so cool compared to other, cheaper MP3 players. At about the same time, I came to the realization that this particular reason is incredibly similar to what made the original US Robotics Palm Pilot popular.

What is this one, crucial thing? The ability to sync data. At the time of the Pilot 1000 and, similarly, the 5 GB first generition iPod, competing devices could copy data from the PC to the device. This, of course, is easy. "Look, our MP3 player comes up as a drive and you can just drag your songs to it to play!" "Our personal digital assistant comes with a serial cable so you can load up your contacts!"

What the Pilot did was actually sync your data -- even email -- between the computer and the device. That is, if you made a change to the data on either side it would be updated on the other side the next time you stuck it on the cradle. This same thing happens with the iPod: you play a song and that fact syncs to iTunes or you add a song to your collection and that syncs to your iPod.

Although earlier versions of the Palm could use attachable modems, it wasn't really until the Palm VII when the device could actually be used without a computer. However, even then, you'd usually want to cradle sync it. These days, a Treo doesn't really need to be cradled. Storage has increased from 128 kilobytes in 1995 to 4 GB in the LifeDrive (128 megabytes in the TX, the largest of the flash-only devices). (That's between 1,000x and 32,768x of the original device -- after only 10 years).

The iPod is behind in the product curve -- by about 6 years if the curve is developing at a similar rate. The product curve has been fairly similar, actually. Both made incremental improvements along the way, but if you compare pictures of the first generation iPod to even the most different of the modern iPods, the shuffle, you'll see similarities. Likewise, you'll see similarities between even a pilot 1000 and a Treo.

So, given similar rate of design changes over time and a surprisingly similar type of device with their own genre of portable devices, can we use this to predict the nature of future iPods?

One conclusion might be that we'll see 5 terabyte iPods by 2011. And don't ask why you'll need "that much storage." By then, it won't seem that way. With the 5G iPod, the current storage amount just got relatively smaller because of the video capability.

What else can we expect? I think we can continue to expect smaller sizes. (Think iPod nano mini -- or is that mini nano? Likewise, iPod shuffle mini.) In addition, we can expect to sign incremental improvements to both iTunes and the iPod software over time, much like we have been seeing. Exactly what those will be only time can tell.

But the real question is whether or not we'll see abilities that can cause the cradle to be unnecessary. Even with the ROKR handset, there is no ability to do anything wireless with the iTunes software built into the phone. However, on the Palm front, although most devices now have WiFi and Bluetooth, the primary ones that are used without cradles still seem to be the Treo's, or the phone versions. So, will this only come in the phone versions of the iPod, such as future ROKR generations?

Or will we see WiFi-enabled iPods that can download iTunes songs directly through a hotspot without needing the PC on? Who knows. Apple might not even know yet. They seem to move in small steps so they can react quickly. A good case of this is the video feature of the iPod. Long did they claim it wasn't going to happen, but look at them now.

Posted by Shane on November 20, 2005 11:23 AM | Permalink