IPod Flash: How It Might Work

The new iPod flash due to be unveiled later today by Steve Jobs has no LCD screen, according to MacityNet, an Italian Mac website.

The site's correspondent in San Francisco, the fabulously-named Fabio M. Zambelli, was camped outside the Moscone Center when he caught site of a banner inside: the kind that's rolled up before Jobs' keynote and unfurled afterwards.

The banner had a picture of the new iPod – it's white, small and narrow, according to Fabio – and a couple of slogans: "Life is Random" and "240 songs."

(I went down there Monday afternoon and there was a very bored security guard guarding the banners).

Presumably, the device holds about 240 songs, which it plays at random. Maybe iTunes also selects songs to be loaded onto the device at random; just as it does with a regular iPod if a music collection exceeds the iPod's capacity.

A year ago, blogger Kevin Fox sketched out how such a flash iPod might work:

"... At the end of the day, when you plug your iPod into your Mac's firewire port, the computer can take a look at the music you listened to since the last sync, chuck those songs from the iPod, and randomly select more titles from the computer's iTunes library (toss 8 electronica songs, load up 8 fresh tracks, etc.).

Of course, if there's a song you listened to during the day that you'd like to keep on the player, you can always mark it with a button, to 'save until I delete' and it'll stick around. Further, you could, via the iTunes interface, choose specific songs or albums to be saved temporarily or indefinitely on the iPod. Basically, songs would be ephemeral unless specifically marked as eternal.

Think Different: Think TiVo. You get new stuff, you view (listen to) it. The next time: you have new stuff....

I don't like thinking about music half as much as I like listening to it, and it's my bet that you don't either. Have you ever had the experience of deciding what to watch, looking through your tapes and/or DVDs, shrugging, turning on the TV, finding something on TV that you own, but deciding to watch it on TV, even though you passed over it in your own library? There is an appeal to non-premeditated media. It's why random shuffle exists. It's why having a random tenth of my music collection in my hand is just as good as all of it. Better if it means twice the battery life, half the weight, and a third off the cost."

In addition, Lindsey Lohan in a TV interview last week mentioned making an "iPod radio" ad for Apple. IPod radio? Fox has something to say about this also. Fox imagines an iTunes subscriptions/podcast service:

" Heck, though I dislike digital rights protections as much as the next hacker, I'd be happy with a netflicks model: You get an iPod-full of music, downloaded straight to the device in a format you can't offload, and every time you're done with some music, it gets tossed and new music comes in, and all you pay is a monthly fee for the service, no matter how much music you get. Think of it as subsidized, commercial-free radio, only you can skip, repeat, and tailor your station to the precise genres and/or artists you like."

Of course, if Fabio's right, the new iPod looks nothing like this, but it is pretty... (Found here).