There is. Me.

Right now I'm sitting in an airport lounge, waiting for my flight which is delayed by an hour. At the least. Ok, they've got free wireless internet access here (yeah) but I'd love to have a small movie player with a decent battery life on me.

Well then i guess Apple needs to make this device since you'll buy one. eh ?

get real now.... how many ppl find themselves in such a situation that they would readily drop $xxx on a device to keep them busy for a couple of hours (isnt that what laptops are for anyway ?)

Cheers.

Dude, you sound like you need to get more expensive plane tickets. Then you'd get into the proper lounge where you can get massages by exotic virgin princesses and stuff.



I'm with Hawkeye on this. When you're out, be out.
Call me a Luddite, but it still amuses me when I see a group of friends walking down the road all talking on mobile phones and not to each other. Like, talk to the people you're with! Look at the environment you're in. The video will wait until that wet-outside-so-stay-inside kind of day.

Having said that, DVD screens in the back of cars are a good thing - tends to stop kids from saying "are we there yet?" every 30 seconds.

I tried. My bank manager gave me that look and my credit card started smoking at the edges. Back to cattle class it was

Seriously though, I am sure it will happen sooner or later. I agree with the 'be aware of your environment' sentiment, in general, but right now I wouldn't mind a movie or two.

Me too! erm.. I'd love the video functionality for plugging into the livingroom tv!

Why not? iTunes music for main, go in the extras menu to get video or iphoto library (or the usual stuff), and either run it on your screen or send out on video out...

That'd work! Just make the audio out jack a 3 prong one (like what video cams use), and make an optional one (using the dock plug probably) that has s-video out

See the thing is, having it for a tv video player or an iphoto slideshow of sorts is great! if anything I'd make it so it either does a slideshow or a manual picture-by-picture thing... having it run on the internal screen as well would be a bonus for times you're at an airport.

In a case like that you really wouldn't need the ipod to be designed around the screen, if anything an internal 2" or 2.5" or whatever would work perfectly fine! The thing is, dumping it in the extras menu would make it transparent so to say.. use a cheap OLED and the ipod is still a great music player with almost nothing changed but a much nicer screen

Truth be told I think stuff like that would be fine.. it's when you come to using stuff that requires text input that you don't need an ipod -- you need a laptop or specific PDA.

For quick times where you're not going to be sitting for more than an hour or so, say an airport or something where you're going to get deadly bored.. and there's nothing 'natural' to observe (dentist's office, underground train, airport, etc), why not?

The ultimate ipod (but will probably not be made ever (or aa very long time):
* Same current style, headphone jack made into a 3 prong instead of 2 for video out (easily interchangable with a cheap video cam cord here)...
* Internal 802.11b for internet radio [no other reason comes to mind] stored within itunes playlists (or a radio playlist like itunes hehe)
* Internal am/fm/dab tuner :]
* video out port also having a backwards function of audio in/video in. That would be pure madness. Export your DV to the ipod off the bat This way you'd only have one jack but who's going to be wanting to listen and record at the same time anyway?
* The ability to playback that video/sync hehe.
* inline CF/SD/whatever SPECIFIC card reader (several small ones included and you choose which one to carry with your cam).

The market is there.. throwing something like that on the shelf for ~$599 would be cool People would buy it

It's essentially like a mini everything O_o You have music, video, photos.. Granted that every feature is a niche feature there's so many niche uses....

video people exporting their dv onto the ipod, photo people dropping their picts onto the ipod (already possible), music people saving high quality audio to their ipod, and of course playback of all 3.

Oh how I wish.

Yeah, I hear ya. I only flew first once when I got a cheapo upgrade. I tell ya, them folks in first class got it real good. When I did it (long time ago), Heathrow first lounge actually had a bathroom attendant. Free sarnies, loads of TVs, on-ground trolly dollies... Basically the works.



What? Are you saying chatting to us isn't interesting enough?

http://www.archos.com/products/av30...3by4j3jfbkk44f4

I don't thinks the iPods HD is fast enough for DV is it? Anyway I don't know about that, I do think they should have a usb port so you could connect a camera that way instead of that beklin thing but whatever I probably would get that if I don't get a new camera with an HD when they come out.

Anyway yeah video iPod I keep wondering WHY iPods seem to me to be a lot more of a device that it's great when you want it out but most of the time you're not really interacting with it... that said I really want one of the new cheap ones if they come...

I'll bet that "genius" has kids. I'd also wager that the aforementioned genius has relatives living more than an hour away from home.

Yeah, no market.

That's why Sony's iPod/Video Player is selling like crazy in Japan

If that came here, I'd be all over it like white on rice.

Mike

for me, i wouldnt want to watch video on a screen smaller than my laptop screen.

i wouldnt want to carry a portable movie playing device that was big enough to accomodate a 5" screen (the smallest i could picture using).

if the device could stream a ripped DVD movie to a TV via s-video cable or the like, i think thats a nice piece of functionality. but i dont think people want smaller screens. except for teh "oh look, lord of the rings on a 2.5" screen. how cute" factor.

Popele will buy it because they can. It's that simple. Most people will buy anything just because it has more features, even if they don't need those features. So Apple has to start playing catch up, or people will chose other products over the ipod. I might not play videos all the time, but I could if I had a player that did so.




Chris

I wouldn't look at Japan for comparisons like that, since it seems inherently biased towards small electronic gadgets. Japanese are also wild after crazy imode phones and what not. If I look at the adoption of imode and similar gadgets here in Germany, I'd pretty much come to the conclusion that there is absolutely no market for geek-toys like that. There's at least one company that wants to give back their UMTS licence. Nobody needs video-on-demand everywhere and nobody except a few geeks needs a small device to watch videos on (and especially not for 600�!).

I honestly doubt Steve Jobs would ever approve a videoPod.

Link ?

P.S.>> just cause the japs are doing it, dosent necessarily make it a good thing.

and umm... there are only so many cave-dwelling-geeks and techno-philes outside Japan.

Actually, I can see a fair few geeks wanting to view their "downloaded from P2P" material late at night under the covers (and they're gonna go blind doing that kind of thing anyways, so no big deal about the screen being small).

So it might actually sell some. Just not to me.

and they dont have a laptop, because ...... ?

want a portable video player ? get a laptop, a new dedicated device is unnecessary. to do such things as decode video(MPG, MPV< AVI, MP4,etc) or DVDs youre gonna need some serious horsepower, which means a cooling system and a longer battery life.

Someone considering this 'videoPod' has a choice to buy a low end laptop (maybe even second hand).... which do you think he will choose ?

portable video is not the same as portable audio. you can run, work out, etc with portable audio...you vision is uninhibited.Try doing the same with video (kidding). that level of portability is not needed for video.

The 'perfect' level of performance, quality and cost are already met with a device know as the portable computer.

Laptops are real hard to handle when you're under the covers stroking yourself and you're worrying about your mom walking in. Apparently.

Racist!

/ end obligatory stupidity

--

Some rice is brown, you know.

/ end stupid snide comment

Nice.

Video headsets haven't been done just right yet.

Since Apple is in the business of doing things right, I wouldn't be surprised if they were looking into developing a consumer - level headset, with their close ties to display component manufacturers and all.

I tried the Sonys back in 1999 and was still positively surprised. As pointed out above, you obviously can't jog or read or multitask in any other way, like you can do with audio.

That's the point. The immersion blocks out the real world, a bit like sitting in the movies. A small screen won't do it and won't block out the too chatty neighbour in the next seat. Privacy.

Some companies have been developing the technology, so it isn't a lost promise just yet.

The technology will be getting smaller, until it vanishes. I don't expect screen size and audio quality to follow that roadmap.

J

Ummm... I never did get this.

Call someone from the UK a "Brit", it's OK.
Call someone from Japan a "Jap" or "Nip", it's frowned upon.

Someone please explain?

You're typing this on a 12" Powerbook? Eh?

How much more perfect can it get - provided they manage to get a six-hour battery life out of the thing eventually?

-s*

My fiancee is constantly taking pictures and then we look through them together on the 1.3" LCD on her camera... Honestly, if a "video-pod" had a screen about the size of a 4x6, I'd love to tote around a little gallery of snapshots and homevideos, especially for times when I'm not at a computer to show a gallery. It makes sense for us.

I can imagine sharing pictures this way at family reunions and during the holidays. Because there aren't TVs or computers everywhere you go where you want to get a decent look at a roll of pictures or a home movie, and toting a laptop or a big binder of pictures isn't great sociall fun when you've got wine in one hand, little kids running around tables, and you don't want the time or effort to set up a big presentation. There are PC things like this but the reason I don't have one is because I'm pretty Apple-centric. I need things to behave nicely with OS X.

A lot of people already watch short video clips on their cell phones. I certainly do. A video iPod makes sense to me. It wouldn't work unless Apple made it "one button" simple to put video on it, though.

Well, you don't go around and start calling Gemans "Germs", do you?

Oh. Hmm. Now that I think of it... it has a nice ring to it..

Oh no it isn't! (Not for all Brits, anyway!)

That's just because the Sun tends to call us "Huns".

-s*

hahahahaha...
well i personally dont see anything wrong with ' Japs'. i didnt mean it in any negative way.So if you take it in a negative way, it's your problem.

A video ipod would just be a gimmick.

There's a reason for a portable DVD player, but that is basically a gimmick itself. Really, it's a reason to get a cheap laptop.

What would the masses play on this video ipod? I view a TON of video online, everything from davidlynch.com to cspan, and almost all video available legitimately and easily online is impossible or extremely difficult to play offline.

The content for a video ipod simply does not exist in abundance now.

And it's not comparable to music. You can't easily, legitimately or even remotely quickly rip a DVD like you can a CD. Very different situations.