iPod PDA inevitable?
Interesting article in the FT about the inevitability of an iPod PDA. Analyst Jakob Nielson insists that, “as the pods go up in gigabytes, it’s inevitable that they will become general purpose storage devices. Add a colour screen and they become photo viewers.” From there he believes it’s a small step for music hard drives to add PDA functionality: “all a PDA needs to become a music player is a higher quality chip and a headset plug.”
So Apple CEO Steve Jobs can insist all he likes about the iPod’s only raison d’etre being the music, but as hard drives become smaller and cheaper, an all-singing all-dancing music player-PDA hybrid is apparently the obvious conclusion.
iRiver certainly seems to think so. Marketing manager, Carsten Bickhoff, expects that “within 12 to 15 months there will be a hard drive-based player with true PDA functionality.”
Read [via Macworld]
