Okay, so there's a new iPod in town. It's big, it's bad, and it can call your girlfriend and whisper sweet nothings into her ear, so I'd worry if I were you. Kidding. This writer has argued that the new iPhone might actually be the newest generation of the iPod - I mean, God, the touchscreen, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the web browsing, and yeah, it calls your girlfriend, too. It might as well be the sixth, or seventh, or somethingth-generation iPod in the near future.

Permit me to raise my hand and ask the obvious question, then: What now of the current iPod lineup?

It was only last year that Apple unveiled the latest iPods (+ Nano and Shuffle), now with video capabilities, aluminum shells (Nano), and small enough to become a really weird earring. Or clip your homework with (Shuffle). Then again, they've been upgrading iPods like Nintendo upgrades Game Boys, the iPhone wouldn't be too out of pattern. Although coming in at a hefty US$ 600, which does limit the number of early adopters, and with less memory (8GB max), features-wise the iPhone just blew away its entertainment-centric cousins. Talk about paling in comparison.

No, the iPhone won't spell the end of the iPod as we know it, if only for costing as much as a 60GB PS3, plus only having 8GB max memory. But if the price drops - and knowing Apple's history with its gadgets, and if memory storage can be improved, oh boy will that price drop and become more tempting!

This depends on two things - how Apple markets the iPhone now and in the coming months, and how quickly the market will be willing to trade in their cellphones AND iPods for an iPhone. Still, none of our potential scenarios predict the end of the iPod as we know it. But they all do point to a change in how Apple markets the iPod.

Consider the iPhone the newest, and most certainly, high-end iPod, a position previously (or currently, depending on how you look at the iPhone) held by the video-capable iPod. We're betting that once Apple's got a good flow of iPhones moving down the assembly line and in the street, future pricing will be scaled to the iPod lineup (with extra charges, since it does have a cellphone built inside). This means that when the iPhone's price drops, the prices of the other iPods may drop as well. The current gen may become the mass-market iPod of the future at this rate.

Next step: improve the memory capacity of the iPhone. A swap to a hard drive is the current best option available, but that will play merry heck on the battery life of a device with a big, pretty touch screen and Bluetooth, cellular and Wi-Fi antennae, Apple's ingenious power-saving features notwithstanding. Even an improvement to 16GB flash, or 32GB flash, or even 64GB flash (though costly), or even radical small and low-power HDD designs, would be a decidedly good improvement. Punching up the memory will go a long way to cement the iPhone's position as the high-end iPod.

Now to work on the lower, mass-market end of the iPod family - the purely entertainment iPods, the "Stand-Alone" iPods. It's quite possible that we may see some sort of merging of products to shake up the iPod line somewhat. Keep the current 5G iPod (or create its successor), but reduce its price and widen its market base as the iPhone becomes more widely available, lower in price (and gains more memory). Merge the Nano and Shuffle into a single, audio-only product (or perhaps keep them separate - there are advantages to having a display screen on an MP3 player, after all).

In the not-too-distant future (in three years, perhaps), we may see Apple's consumer electronics lineup settle into three products: the iPhone for the high-end, with improved memory storage; a video-capable "Stand-Alone iPod" for those who still want to keep their cellphones but love the iPod, and the "Stand-Alone" Nano and Shuffle, or even a radical hybrid of the two, as the low-end, audio-only option. It may even be that the lineup in each would be further segmented into pricey, high-features options and cheaper, low-features options, playing to the strengths of Fortress iTunes.

Yeah, we could miss our call entirely on this one - no one can really predict what the wily, maybe even wicked, Steve Jobs and engineers will pull out of Apple's hat next. But the iPod ain't just for music anymore, it seems. Unless you're the one with a Stand-Alone.

Yes, we do know we've borrowed a technical and p[hilosophical term from a certain Japanese anime. But if you think about the iPod's position in a slowly converging market, it's actually rather appropriate when you get down to the basics. Again, thanks to resident MacCrack addict Chris S. for his input and ideas!