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 sicth, 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 they 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.

Okay, a $ 600 iPod that calls my oft-neglected girlfriend. Suddenly, the idea of a stand-alone iPod sounds... more romantically safe. More after the jump.

If Jon Lech Johansen - the same Jon Lech Johansen they call DVD Jon who reverse-engineers data formats and has become infamous for hacking encrypted DVDs so that they play in Linux at the tender age of 15 - is after your technology, would you lose sleep over it?

Well apparently not Apple head honcho Steve Jobs. After a meeting with Johansen and his partner Monique Farantzos some time in January discussing their new company plans, he dismissed it by saying that while Apple was not a litigious company, other firms of the same nature might not go so easy on whatever DVD Jon might be up to.

Now, while Steve Job's extreme confidence is admirable, will it bite him back in his arse? See, Johansen's plan is to add the DRM rather than breaking it. He wants to license the technology to companies who want their content to be playable on Apple devices.

This is not the first time for DVD Jon to get in the ring with Apple. In November 2003, Johansen released QTFairUse, an open source program which dumps the raw output of a QuickTime AAC stream to a file that could bypass the digital rights management (DRM) software used to encrypt content of music from media such as those distributed by the iTunes Music Store, Apple Computer's on-line music store.

The last bit of news we got from Apple's latest display-actuator toy was a press report from AppleInsider of Apple filing patents overseas and of their engineers giving some details of the device. Also provided there was a schematic from the patent application featuring the control mechanisms that make the display move, rotate, and click at a finger's command. And that's it. A device that promises to (probably) eliminate conventional control buttons and maximize gadget-surface real estate, and that's all the details we can get.

Until now. A report at the MacNN site finally gives details of the display actuator, also based on the patent applications Apple has filed and which the US Patent & Trademark Office and European Patent Office published. If you happen to be engineering-inclined and have a great tolerance for reading long blocks of text, you can read the source article at the link below, along with their caveat that "MacNN presents only a brief summary of patents with associated graphic(s) for journalistic news purposes as each such patent application and/or grant is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trade Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any patent applications and/or grants should be read in its entirety for further details."

Now if the MacNN details were not enough for you and you have a really great tolerance for reading long blocks of text conveniently unedited by a government office, then you can probably have a crack at the USP&TO's or EPO's publication of said patent (in case you're wondering, the USP&TO's website doesn't have the publication yet, but it probably will be uploaded in the future).

If you're neither, and you're still curious as to the future of touch-controlled technology, we've got a summary waiting for you.


Read on at the full article.

Display actuators for electronic devices have been one of the focal experiments of Apple computer. The company claims that a display actuator will serve to both display visual information and act as a mechanical input, therefore reducing the space needed to implement both components on devices such as media players. The device can possibly display visual information like text, characters and graphics. It can also take on multiple roles, such as a clickable button, sliding toggle, rotating dial, or a motion controlling device (ie. joystick).

Two of a display actuator's main functions are its compatibility to be incorporated into any electronic device to control various aspects of the electronic device, and/or as a stand alone device that operatively couples to an electronic device through wired or wireless connections.

"The display may [...] be made movable through a combination of joints such as a pivot/sliding joint, pivot/flexure joint, sliding/flexure joint [or] pivot/pivor joint in order to increase the range of motion," Apple engineers said on the display component, which could be based on LCD, OLED, Plasma or rear-projection technology.

One of its promised advantages is that conventional input means on electronic devices having displays can be substantially eliminate, since the display provides user inputs.

The highly anticipated debut of the next-gen iPod expected late this year could be a no-show. Instead, the new apple of Apple investors' eyes may surface in the first quarter of 2007.

According to Shaw Wu of American Technology Research, the delay was caused by Apple's switching of chip supplier from PortalPlayer to another chipmaker. Apple engineers also need more time to kick up the power of the video iPod's battery life and increase its screen size. The next-gen iPod nano is expected to have twice as much capacity as the pre-gen (4GB and 8GB).

Despite the production glitches, Wu expects Apple to introduce yet another new high-end iPod model. So far Apple has no comment on the issue.