Apple raises the bar

AS APPLE CEO Steve Jobs confirmed
in his live satellite broadcast from
California: Apple has the most
popular MP3 player in the world in the
iPod mini, so they?re going to stop
making it.

Of course this was for
dramatic effect as the reality is
they have shrunk it, improved
it and rebranded it as the
iPod nano.

The emphasis at the launch
was on how tiny it is, which was
fair enough because it is.

Front-on,
it?s not that much smaller
than the mini, but side-on it?s
wafer thin.

?iPod nano is the
biggest revolution since the
original iPod,? said Steve Jobs,
Apple?s CEO.

?iPod nano is a full featured
iPod in an impossibly small
size, and it?s going to change the rules
for the entire portable music market.?

The other conspicuous new feature is
a colour screen, now also standard
issue on the iPod, meaning that the
4GB version can hold 1,000 songs,
25,000 photos or some combination of
the two.

As well as the usual white, it
will also come in black. The
4GB model will have a street price of
?179 and the 2GB one will go for ?139.

The nano launch somewhat
overshadowed the other big Apple news,
which was the launch of the Motorola
ROKR iTunes mobile phone.

The ROKR
comes with iTunes preinstalled but that
is just to manage audio files; you still
have to download from the website onto
your computer first.

It remains to be seen, however, how
popular this concept will be, as the
ROKR can only hold 100 songs and,
despite the presence of stereo
speakers, will be a poor substitute for
a dedicated MP3 player.