iPod progress

I got an new iPod nano for my birthday yesterday. I considered the iPhone and iPod Touch, but their poor keyboard won't replace my Sidekick, and they omitted the most important features.
Specifically, iPhone lacks instant messaging, and both iPhone and iPod touch have Wifi, yet unaccountably don't support iTunes song sharing.

A bit of context here — back when we were pitching Wifi and Zeroconf to Steve Jobs at Apple, the killer demo was the iTunes + QuickTime sharing of music and videos — Macs in the same room finding each other and making their music libraries and videos mutually available, whether you have a router or not. The underlying protocol here is called DAAP, which is just some conventions for using HTTP 1.1 to play remotely and update the song list.

However, the edition of iTunes this went out in was unfortunately the same one that added the iTunes Store. From our developer point of view, the fact that there were 4 separate open source interoperating implementations of DAAP within a week was a big burst of validation for our efforts, but this caused huge confusion among the Record Labels that Jobs had invested so much time in schmoozing to set the store up. Eventually, after too many arguments with Label execs where he tried to explain "but the songs bought from iTunes Store won't be playable remotely, just the CD-ripped ones", he insisted the protocol be changed, which it was, several times.

The social sharing of music via iTunes is still a new and lovely feature of offices, campuses and coffee shops everywhere. But the iPhone users are left out in the cold. They can't see iTunes libraries, they can't share their own songs. Watching the launch of the "buy the song playing in Starbucks" feature, my immediate thought was "Steve, do you want to change the world, or do you just want to sell sugared coffee to kids?"

That said, I am a big fan of the 206 dpi screen on the new iPod nano. I did the maths, and that implies a full HD screen (1920x1200 with room for a controller bar) that is about 9.5 inches by 6 inches - sounds like a nice new Apple subnotebook for MacWorld January. Three and a half years ago, I pointed out the very rapid growth of storage per buck. I now have an iPod that is half the price, a tenth the weight and volume, and that plays video as predicted.