Some guy called Steve Jobs (ever hear of him?) did something called a keynote speech for like the millionth time this year yesterday evening. Apparently he does these kind of things fairly often. Yesterday’s keynote speech was in relation to the next generation of iPods.
Apple have taken the iPhone, removed the Phone part and replaced it with the Pod. What you get is an iPhone which can’t make telephone calls but which does allow you to listen to music and connect wirelessly to iTunes, ohh and it has a a fancy touch screen too. It’s called the iPod Touch. Amazingly enough it only costs $100 less than an iPhone but has about 1/4 of the features, but I suppose you do get screwed with AT&T if you go down the iPhone route (comment based on American iPhone release).
It comes in a fairly paltry 8GB(€299) and 16GB(€399) and contains Safari (Web Browser), a WiFI connection and an interesting Starbucks feature…
If you’re in Starbucks drinking a Choco Mooke Banana Latte with sprinkles of extra Choco and you’re acting extra pretentious because you have your iPod Touch in hand and you know that everyone is looking at you but you’re trying to concentrate on looking cool without trying to put in too much effort to cool because you don’t want to look needy but in reality you are and you want to listen to some ‘tunes’ but you’re sick of listening to Jon Bon Jovi and Aerosmith and you want to listen to something less 90’s and more ‘hip’…..well now you can.
You can tune into Starbucks’ radio playlist via the iPod Touch’s inbuilt WiFI connection. This feature also allows you to download the currently playing track and lets you browse the last ten tracks played as well.
Some guy explains it in more detail in the below video (3minutes and 30seconds in)
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Does this feature infringe on a Patent though?
When I was finishing my third year in college, May 2005, one of my lecturers spoke to myself and a few of my classmates about a project he was soon to be working on. It was a really adventurous venture and I personally could not see how it could be implemented.
So what was his idea?
You’re driving in a car or you’re in a shop and you hear a song on the radio. You find yourself humming along to the track and you wish you knew the name of the track so you could buy it on iTunes when you get home….You take a small device out of your pocket, it identifies the radio station’s frequency and subsequently manages to identify the track which is playing (I’m not quite sure how this is done). You then head on home and you connect the deceive to your PC. The device launches iTunes and brings you to the iTunes Store which presents the before-mentioned track for your download. Da-DAAAAHHHH! And you’re done. A satisfied customer.
I don’t know the Patent number so I can’t check what exactly they have patented but is it too similar to the technology which is going to be used in the Apple - Starbucks agreement?
Other posts about the iPod Touch
