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Join Date: 21 Apr 2003 Location: Penang
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Reputation: 2162 Rep Power: 56 |  Apple Unveils a New IPod and a Phone Music Player!
Quote:
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 7 - Apple moved on Wednesday to extend its dominance over the digital music marketplace, introducing a compact iPod called the nano and confirming a widely reported digital music partnership with Motorola and Cingular.
 The iPod Nano can hold 1,000 songs
and is .27 inches thin and weights 1.5 ounces.
With his usual showmanship, Apple's chairman, Steven P. Jobs, saved the introduction of the new solid-state version of the iPod for last, slipping it from the change pocket of his Levi blue jeans at the end of a press event at the Moscone Convention Center here.
The iPod nano, which stores either 500 or 1,000 songs and is priced at $199 and $249, is intended to replace an existing model, the iPod Mini. The new device will be available in the United States, Japan and Europe this week.
"The iPod nano is the biggest revolution since the original iPod," Mr. Jobs said.
In an interview after his presentation, he called the new player, which is one of the industry's smallest, a "bold gamble."
By replacing the Mini, which accounts for more than half of all iPods currently sold, the company risked a huge revenue shortfall if the new product had been delayed, Mr. Jobs said. Despite that risk, he said, the nano reflects several innovations.
He focused on the shift away from the small disk-drive storage device used in the iPod Mini to the solid-state flash memory at the heart of the nano. He said the custom chips and the miniaturized circuit board used in the nano had also been potential stumbling blocks.
"Entire factories were created to make this device," he said. "Overnight we have become the largest consumer of flash memory in the world." The flash memory enables the device to be smaller and more durable.
Mr. Jobs described an Apple "top 100" meeting earlier this year - a retreat of the company's top employees - where he urged those attending to take a big risk rather than fall into complacency in protecting the company's lead in digital music.
Other gambles that Apple might have taken - a video set-top box, a palmtop device, a portable video player - have yet to come to pass after waves of speculation. Still, several analysts concurred that Mr. Jobs was taking a significant gamble with the nano and said it was likely to be successful.
"It looks like a really hot product," said Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director of Jupiter Research, a market research firm based in Teaneck, N.J.
The nano comes with a color screen and the company's distinctive click-wheel navigation feature. It measures 1.6 by 3.5 inches and is a quarter-inch thick; the Mini, by comparison, is 2 by 3.6 inches and a half-inch thick. (The comparably priced Mini, however, offered slightly greater battery life than the nano - 18 hours versus 14 - and greater capacity, at 1,500 and 1,000 songs.)
Several analysts said that Apple had moved the introduction of the nano ahead to insure it would be widely available for the holiday season.
Most of the event on Wednesday was devoted to the unveiling of a Motorola cellphone called the ROKR E1, which will incorporate Apple's iTunes music software and be capable of storing 100 songs. The phone, long anticipated, will be available exclusively on the Cingular Wireless network in the United States.
The phone, which will sell for $250, has a color display, but requires that songs be downloaded from an iTunes-equipped personal computer by a U.S.B. cable. Cingular will not offer an iTunes service for buying songs directly over a cellphone connection.
Asked why the phone did not offer the possibility of purchasing music directly, Mr. Jobs said that the economics of wirelessly downloading songs to a cellphone would be different from buying them online, probably costing about $3 a song, though he did not elaborate.
Ron Garriques, president of Motorola's mobile devices division, said his company had not discussed the prospect of directly downloading music with Cingular. Such a service would not make sense until Cingular offered a higher-speed network to allow faster downloading of data, including songs, something it is expected to do next year.
Cingular's chief operating officer, Ralph de la Vega, said he had used the phone as a music player continuously on a cross-country flight, then landed and used it for a one-hour conference call followed by three or four other calls without draining the battery.
In what appeared to be a direct challenge to the music industry, which has been struggling with him behind the scenes over Apple's growing influence in the music world, Mr. Jobs outlined in detail the strength of his digital music business.
He said Apple had sold half a billion digital songs and had 85 percent of the world market for digital music sales. The iTunes music service is now available in 20 countries, he said.
He also noted that Apple had sold 6.2 million iPods of all models in the third quarter, comparing that figure to Sony's PlayStation Portable game machine, which sold two million during the same period.
In recent weeks, Mr. Jobs has been struggling with several of the major music companies over the prices of digital songs. He has been urging the industry to hold to the 99-cent price for songs.
Mr. Jobs said on Wednesday that he was pleased that the details surrounding the nano player had not surfaced prematurely in the press or on the Macintosh rumor sites on the Web.
"It would have broken my heart," he said.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/te...y/08apple.html |
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8th Sep 2005, 08:56 AM
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