If I were to design an ipod killer, I would set the player aside and concentrate on designing a media/music organizer/podcast catcher and music store, utility first, and design the player around this software. When the player is unhooked from the computer, a smaller, handheld version of the persons’ home music library is accessible, intuitive, and ready to go. I don’t want to have to do tech support for my device every time I hook up the player to the computer. I don’t want unpredictability, and bugginess, or three applications in the place of one elegant solid application. If I’m subscribed to a video podcast, I’d like the player to download the program, sync to the player, and by the time I’ve poured my morning coffee, I can unhook the player and not worry if the device is able to play the video. A five minute video podcast, shouldn’t take 15 minutes of file translation, tech support, testing and re-synching to the device.

Finally, nothing has captured my attention like the ipod has. I didn’t understand it until after I returned my ho-hum creative device for an ipod classic 80g. Aside from the capacity issues, the devices are virtually the same. Ipods are continuing to be the industry standard due to quietly maintaining a high standard of quality through 5 generations of the same player.

Just as Kleenex is generica for facial tissue. Ipod is equated with all mp3 players.

let me know here and we can figure out a way of getting this to you….

The price goes to Restiffbard. The iTunes Applescript does the job exactly the way I wanted it. Thanks a lot for your suggestions though, they will undoubtedly come in handy at some later point in time….

had a similar problem a while back where i wanted to split large mp3s (live sets) into parts, while there are quite a number of apps out there that can do it, i found most of them to be bloated or they required you to buy it, so i ended up writing my o…

have spent some time converting and tagging all thee 42 hours into mp3. i was wondering if poeple here are interested in it, as I have already spent a lot of time making it IPOD compactable….

Ever seen other digital device batteries?

What most fail to realize is that music is so different from other types of entertainment. It’s extremely personal and quality and eventually quantity become extremely important to the individual music lover.
The iPod succeeds because of it’s seemlees intergration with iTunesITMS.
It works, it’s simple.
Has anyone ever figure out how to use all the functions available on cell phones? Can you imagine the interface that a music service on a cell phone is going to have? Not to mention price per download.

Cell phone with reasonable capacity will have mass appeal, but I don’t believe it’s going to have the impact that all the mouth-pieces would have you believe.

Darryl

I know the IPOD is popular, but I actually RETURNED the IPOD I bought (I am a loyal mac user), and by choice do not have a portable music player at this time as I have yet to find anything that’s up to my standards. If there are others like me, there’s still a market waiting to be tapped.

The decisive factor was IBM. It was the leader in the computer field and was known for its first-class support. IBM was computers. Of course, what people didn’t realize was that its reputation for leadership and support was acquired manufacturing and maintaining mainframes. Its PC quality and support were at best mediocre. The Computerland dealer in our town told me that half of the first shipment of PCs were dead on arrival, but people still went crazy and drooled over those grey boxes that weren’t near as fast or sophisticated as the 8-bit Apple ///.

The same thing happened with Windows. People who had been struggling with MS-DOS for years sincerely thought Windows 3.1 was the second coming and Windows 95, well, that was the rapture. It was emotional, not rational. Macs were always cheaper to own and worked better than DOS or Windows machines, but nobody ever got fired for buying IBM and later Microsoft. I might also mention that the reliability of the Macs meant far fewer consultants and maintenance personnel were required, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the consulting folks.

The iPod is in a similar but not identical position. It does not have the bedrock emotional support of the corporate IT types that has kept the MS in the top position and justified the large corporate IT staffs necessary to feed the MS beast. It depends on a relatively fickle market.

Still, the overwhelming market dominance and the emotional attachment of most folks to their iPods means that they will not jump to a competitor’s product without considerable justification. It works well with little or no hassle. I would like to see a wireless or bluetooth link to iTunes to eliminate the cable. The only flaw I can think of is that when I turn it off it occasionally forgets where I stopped in the middle of an ebook and forces me to search for the spot while driving down the road. Overall, it’s a first-class product.

But I don’t think they will. Sony have consistently demonstrated that they do not “get it”. It has taken them years to release a music player that plays MP3s without requiring prior conversion to ATRAC. Players that they have produced have had appalling, fiddly user interfaces, and that’s to say nothing of the software on the computer. As some of you will doubtless be aware, Sony cannot make software. At all.

So it won’t be Sony. And, given now that Apple have the whole car integration thing going, any company that wants to pull it off will have to use the Dock connector. I think people underestimate how significant the Dock-connector-in-cars thing actually is – it makes the iPod the standard for digital audio players (or, should Apple ever choose to go down that route, Apple-licensed ones).

Without wishing to be complacent in the manner you describe, I think it will take a lot – an awful lot – to dislodge Apple from their dominant position now.

But how much more innovation can they squeeze out of it? An iPod camera? An iPod pod that you embed under your skin?

There’s always the risk that they cram too many features into it and tick of consumers (europe, anyone?) who rather have multiple gadgets than cram everything into one device.

But all the requirements for an iPod killer are good and true. Perhaps the single biggest attraction, one that Jobs is billing, is the seamless integration between music store, software and iPod. And somehow i don’t see competitors coming up with that sort of integration, simply because they don’t control everything like Apple does.

Good article overall. I liked it.