Talk to the Pod – New iPod feature!

I see that the new range of iPods are packed with new features. OK, I already knew that the iPod was much more than a simple MP3 player – the iPod Touch had WI-FI capability and I knew that you could download movies and play them on many iPods. I can see how far the iPod has come from the first 5MB ‘classic’ iPod. Since then, of course, we've had the iPod Mini, the iPod Nano, bigger and bigger capacity ‘Classic’ iPods and, of course, the iPod Touch, as already mentioned.

Some people have had their gripes about the iPod, a major one, surprisingly, being the lack of a radio tuner. Well, seeing as Steve Jobs was involved in the project from the start, perhaps this isn’t so surprising. After all, this is the man who turned Apple around in 1998 with the iMac – an all-in-one desktop computer that, thanks to Jobs’ purity of vision, lacked a floppy disk drive because floppy disks were inefficient, held a mere 1MB of data (and if you wanted to transfer a file smaller than 1MB there were better ways to do it), were unreliable and prone to errors (you can’t seriously be thinking of backing up on this, can you?) and, compared to CD media, they were expensive. So following that rationale, if you were the proud owner of a shiny new iPod with a playlist of all your all-time favourite music at your disposal, why would you want to be listening to the radio anyway? Answer, you wouldn’t. Right?

Well, this generation of iPods includes a radio tuner. And that’s not all. Amongst a host of new features I see the new generation iPod Nano even includes a video camera – although why you would want to make a video on an 8 or 16GB MP3 player escapes me. The only thing I think Apple could add to the mix now is a mobile phone – oh hold on a minute, that would be the iPhone (which also, coincidentally, browses the web, includes games and even plays MP3 files...)

So Apple, where to from here?

Actually there is one other feature that would be very useful. If you do an internet search on ‘iPod’ and ‘hearing loss’ you will find thousands of pages confirming what has long been suspected including this one from as early as 2005 – iPods, along with other portable music players that include earbuds that fit inside the ear canal are a very real contributor to hearing loss. In fact it is recommended that users listen to these devices for no longer than 60 minutes a day, at less than 60% of full volume. Greater exposure can cause permanent hearing loss in the middle ranges.

But try pointing this out to your kids and they just don’t want to know. In fact, when they have their iPods in it’s very hard to talk to them at all...

Which is why I suggest that future iPods should also include a very essential feature to compensate for the hearing loss of the iPod generation – an inbuilt hearing aid!