Apple may face an iPod shortage this season, warns Kaufman analyst Shaw Wu in a note to clients released last night.
Wu warns of “stronger than expected” demand for the new range of iPods, observing Apple may have made a more conservative than required estimate of iPod sales during the quarter.
Tony Fadell, the senior vice president of the iPod division at Apple is leaving the company for personal reasons.
Fadell – credited as the “father” of the iPod and part of the team involved in iPhone development – joined Apple equipped with a vision for the iPod. He has been part of the iPod group since 2001.
“Tony’s idea was to take an MP3 player, build a Napster music sale service to complement it, and build a company around it,” a report explains. “Tony had the business idea.”
Fadell approached several companies with his idea – including Real Networks – and was rejected by them all, with the exception of Apple (and we can see why other firms bit the dust in digital music).
Fadell is to be replaced by former IBM executive Mark Papermaster, recently recruited by Apple from IBM, where he led PowerPC chip development and IBM’s Edge Server team.
Headline news all over the place the nanny-state lobby are at it again, warning us all over again that listening to digital music players at high volume can damage our hearing….
I mean – that’s just basic common sense, isn’t it? The whole story of the “we must protect the young” is simply the same shambolic argument these health and safety bullies use each and every time they want more unwarranted control over our lives. (Sorry, but these control freaks annoy me intensely).
Here’s the full European Union press release as cited on the BBC this morning – seems with everyone linking to the BBC’s version of the press release, people may as well get the chance to read the whole thing, here goes”
Three years in development, Rockbox 3.0 has finally shipped online – software that should breathe a little extra life into any aging music players you may have around, including the iPod.
Rockbox is open-source software which replaces the OS on your existing music player which lets them play more music file fomats, delivers audio improvements and includes a tiny version of classic arcade game, Doom and some other games.
Audio improvements include the introduction of support for over 15 formats like FLAC and Ogg, a 5-band parametric EQ, MPEG video, a multilingual interface and the capacity to understand spoken commands (on players with a microphone). Continue reading
Apple’s iPod is becoming the poor relation as the company slugs away at promoting the iPhone, remarked Needham & Co. analyst, Charles Wolf, in a note to clients released this afternoon.
Wolf explained that in his opinion the two “most important aspects of Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event in San Francisco were Steve Jobs’ health and a software update for the iPhone.”
The analyst pointed out that an energetic Jobs may be a little slimmer than before (rather like the iPod range he was promoting), but slim needn’t mean grim.
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Here’s a series of short video clips to guide you through the look and appearance of Apple’s new music player range.
iPod nano 4G
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Sony introduced three new Walkman player models this week at the IFA electronics show in Berlin, including the slimline (7.5mm) S-series.
Boasting up to 40-hours battery life, the S630 and S730 models both play MP3s and also offer video playback on their 2-inch QVGA (320-x-240 pixel) displays. The latter model also offers noise cancelling features.
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Motorola has introduced three new music-playing mobile phones to expand its ROKR range, the EM30, EM28 and EM25 phones.
The EM30 is a candybar phone, the EM28 adopts a clamshell design with “sonic features and touch-sensitive keys”, while the ROKR EM25 is a slider phone with FM radio sharing capabilities. They should ship internationally this year.
The EM30 uses Motorola’s ModeShift technology to illuminate the keyboard – red keys illuminate in music mode and a brilliant blue keypad appears in phone mode.
Additional features include support for MP3, an FM radio with RDS technology and a 3.5mm stereo headset jack (so you can use your choice of headphones). Oh, and it uses Windows Media Player 11 for online music services.
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Dell is making plans to enter the digital music market once again, and has been testing a new music player that may go on sale as soon as September, a report claims.
It’s not the first time Dell has attempted to secure space in the digital music market, but it withdrew its previous MP3 player – the DJ Ditty (pictured) – in the face of the Apple juggernaut (and extremely low sales).