I was just thinking how sweet it would be if they made some kind of in car docking system for the Ipod. All you would need is an audio processor to pipe the decoded mp3 stream from the firewire port to the car's speakers, and a display. I can't imagine space would be a problem, since the Ipod is so freaking tiny. It would be excellent to have all your music in one place, and it would neatly skirt around (same way as the empeg does) the issue of how to get the music from your computer into your car.

I'm sure it's a harder than I've made it sound, but I think it would be very cool, at least for a future mp3 player.

-Adam

they need to get the hdd size higher first

The technology of the PCMCIA hard drive in the iPod just grew to 5gb before they released it, it's doubtful any huge sige jumps will occur in the iPod. And if they move to a 2.5 inch laptop drive, it will loose the size benefit it currently carries.

The technology of the PCMCIA hard drive in the iPod just grew to 5gb before they released it

Toshiba announced 10 and 20Gb versions of it just a couple of days ago. Swines.

Peter (5Gb Ipod, 18Gb music)

Wow, that was fast for a 4x space increase. And I thought the jump from 2gb to 5gb was nice. Glad I waited to buy one of these for my iPaq.

The press release is here.

The next question is what will Apple use to sell the iPod in a 3 tier situation? Big, Bigger, Biggest?

They'll use:

"Relatively modestly-priced", "over-priced" and, "the only one you can order right now, obscenely-priced."

The 5GB drives were released in July of last year I believe. The iPod came out in November, right? I remember hearing about 10GB models very soon afterwards.

Storage technologies look like they're going to really take off over the next couple of years. The supporting industries have done a good job of making sure there's an ever-growing requirement for larger media. There are a number of markets where storage and other technologies are tied closely together, that it doesn't make much sense for one move far ahead until the other is close (I think immediately of CCD imagers and flash-based storage).

The next few years should be very interesting. Though I did expect the past 1.5 years to have shown a much more accelerated pace in the two technologies I mentioned above...

Bruno

Archos 20 Gig player. ( http://www.archos.com/us/products/product_500205.html)
I was using one of these before I got my empeg. Worked about the same really. Has a line out I plugged straight into my (all aftermarket) stereo. Even more simple than you made it sound.

SImpler than I made it sound? Made what sound? Are you talking about something I wrote in another thread here or maybe in another message board entirely?

Archos has a new Multimedia Jukebox. Now that looks pretty sweet. I wish it didn't need to use the external plugin modules, but it looks like a nice solution to unload digital images off your smart media or compact flash while on the road. Hope that battery life is good. It sure beats carting around a laptop on trips just to offload pictures (and looks a lot more promising than solutions from Sima, Nixvue, etc...)

Bruno

The multimedia thing looks okay, but there's some things I don't trust about it. Most of all, it doesn't seem like you can play back the video you just recorded on the LCD. Plus there's the ever-present theory that a neato gadget that does a lot of things doesn't do them all very well.

But I guess we'll see what comes about!

Hi,

Hmm - seems the 10G and 20G are only for internal use, not a PCCARD model.

So its gonna be hard to connect it to an iPAQ ...