eWeek’s Steve Gillmor takes his sweet time getting there, but towards the end of a somewhat rambling essay about the iPod and digital rights management (yawn) he provides an interesting glimpse of how Apple’s player is shifting away from being primarily a music playback device and could eventually transform into a sort of digital storage hub that connects to all your other devices:
There’s already a cute hack that takes RSS feeds and routes them through Mac OS X’s text-to-speech utility, then converts the audio result to an MP3 for import into the iPod. I can listen to my mail, RSS and recorded interviews on the car radio as I drive. With a few lines of AppleScript, I could automate voicemail in the opposite direction, recording notes or dictation and sending it via mail, iChat or even iChat AV for video clips. As Apple opens the iPod’s API to more software, the possibilities become even more intriguing. A video iPod could manifest itself not as an integrated device but as a peripheral rendering extension to the core data store. A Bluetooth module would close the loop between cell phone and laptop, further reducing the PDA to fifth-wheel status. The marriage of laptop, cell phone and storage/player devices creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The phone delivers a persistent low-bandwidth connection to the network, the laptop base station a Wi-Fi link, and the iPod transport between Macs and Windows.
Of course, hopefully it won t be just iPods that are able to do all this, because ideally all portable audio and video players would have similar capabilities.
