widescreen beatles super bowl ipod i

Widescreen Beatles Super Bowl iPod? I don't think so

Labels: iPhone, iPod, speculation

According to AppleGazette, people predict that a widescreen iPod would

debut, loaded with Beatles songs (similarly to the U2 iPod), either at

the Super Bowl in less than two weeks, or at Apple's rumored February

20 event.

I don't think so.

Beatles? Maybe. Steve Jobs did play a lot of Beatles during his last

keynote, so many suspect an announcement regarding the addition of

Beatles tracks to the iTunes Store is imminent. Either that, or Jobs

was just being, well, Jobs again, asking for forgiveness rather than

permission, just like with that Eminem commercial earlier (or with the

iPhone name later). It's hard to tell, but one would think the former

version to be more likely, what with the decades-long Apple vs. Apple

saga.

My problem is with the widescreen part. Apple has just announced a

widescreen iPod: it's called the iPhone. One of the main selling

points of Apple's upcoming cellphone will be being "the best iPod"

ever made. Apple wants to firmly establish it as its new platform.

Apple wants to sell a lot of it. And Apple sure as hell doesn't want

to cannibalize its sales with a competing product.

The iPhone won't ship for another five months. What would happen if a

product went on sale next month, offering an attractive subset of the

iPhone's functionality, including its mulititouch user interface,

presumably a hard disk, and no shackles tying it to an evil cellphone

company?

How silly would Apple appear for announcing a product months ahead,

only to upstage it with a competing product that ships immediately?

That's right. The iPhone could be close to DOA. It could pull a Zune.

Unless Apple has been working on a completely different widescreen

iPod, with a seriously dumbed-down multitouch user interface, I don't

expect a widescreen version until the iPhone has shipped, and its

first-quarter sales numbers have come out strong. I'd rather expect

either price drops with but cosmetic changes to the current form

factor, or not even that much.

I'm not expecting a widescreen, phoneless iPod running OS X and

featuring a lot of the iPhone technologies until the next Christmas

buying season.

Oh, and there's another reason why it's difficult to imagine a

widescreen iPod going on sale in Q1, 2007: apparently, parts of the

iPhone software, notably the Notes app, aren't ready yet. And iPods

also have notes. No demo of the Calendar application (another iPod