When I first heard about Apple’s announcement of the iPod Touch, my first question was “How big is the hard drive??” I easily have 60gb of music, and probably 200gb of video. Size really does matter for my usage patterns.
Since I’d just bought an iPhone and my 80gb iPod is half a year old, I was praying that the Touch was undersized just so I’d feel better about turning my back.
I was actually relieved to discover they only came in 8gb and 16gb flavors. Then I was confused. It’s basically an iPhone without the phone. And why bother with that storage size? It’s a really expensive Nano. They’d Apple also announced a brand new, reimagined Nano. What in the hell is going on?
Then it dawned on me.
The iPod Touch has very little to do with music, video, or the name “iPod”. This device is a PDA. Well sorta. It’s a pocket sized device that deals with things like Web, calendar, email, contacts (business) as well as music, video, and photos (personal/fun). It’s the business-capable device we don’t mind carrying with us on the weekends.
Largely, the PDA market is dead, or at least largely uninteresting. With phones that can handle just about anything we’d need in a portable device, why carry two? But here comes Apple sneaking in the back door of this market…nay, reinvigorating a mostly dead market. Is this their move towards the business customer?
Where they’re going, I’m not sure. This is a master stroke for Apple, and mark my words, this is nowhere near the last we’ve heard from Apple on this front.
