Much of what we were expecting happened at the fall Apple event: iTunes has a new Album format, dubbed iTunes LP, and iPods were served up with performance gains and price drops across the board. The biggest news, however, were the changes rolling into the iPod Nano “For Free” exclaimed Apple founder Steve Jobs.
Jobs continued, “On the back of every nano is a video camera and a mic integrated right in, and a speaker as well.”
I have to imagine the makers of the Flip cameras just had a collective bowel movement.
When the iPhone 3GS first came out I have to admit I immediately marched down to the Apple Store in Bellevue and picked it up. What was the compelling feature? (Aside from bigger storage and more speed., which were also lures.) It was the H.264 video camera built in. With a press of a button I can record, trim and upload decent-quality video clips directly to YouTube. This is a feature I use quite a lot, in fact, as I travel around and test new cars. You can see some clips on YouTube here. Keep in mind that YouTube does degrade quality somewhat.
Now, anyone with a new iPod Nano can get (presumably) the same level of video with single-click upload to YouTube after syncing. What that means is that if you thought YouTube was a wasteland of amateur video before, it’s only going to get worse. A lot worse. Voyeur videographers are also undoubtedly rubbing their hands together with glee, as well.
Keep in mind that Apple, which has sold 220 million iPods worldwide. That’s a lot. In unleashing this new model Apple just destroyed the market for stand-alone, solid-state video recorders. Flip, Creative and all the others better find a way to up their game, because the days of the stand-alone all-it-does is record video is now passed. High-quality video recording will be like having a CD player in your car: it will be expected. If you don’t have that, plus a music player, plus dead-simple use and a large selection of color choices, you’re going to be laughed at.
There’s more to the new Nano, than just being one of the most popular music players in the world. The fresh model also has an FM radio tuner with the ability to do a DVR-style pause (up to 15 minutes), can do voice recording, and it interfaces with Nike+, which is a boon for runners. (Click for full specs at Apple.com) It’s also relatively Green; built with environmental and recycling concerns in mind. What else would you really want in a gadget? Touch screen? Well, true, that would be nice. I can imagine we’ll see an updated iPod Touch before long that finally adds a camera, but that wasn’t announced today.
Many folks were hoping for Apple to announce their upcoming tablet computer today. That would have possibly been a groundbreaking event. That didn’t happen. I would argue, however more mundane, the addition of video recording to the small, svelte, and cheap iPod Nano will have a much bigger effect on society. Let’s watch and see what happens (literally.)
