An Apple patent covering the touchscreen interface for the iPod nano has surfaced, suggesting that the company is considering alternative ways to control the compact PMP even when the display is out of sight in your pocket or bag. According to patent 20100328224, “Playback Control using a Touch Interface”, the nano touchscreen could be used to recognize taps and gestures even if the display itself is switched off.
“An electronic device, however, may not have dedicated playback control buttons or interfaces. In addition, a user may wish to control media playback operations without needing to first look at a display to select a specific displayed option. To allow a user to control media playback using a touch sensing device without requiring the selection of displayed options, the electronic device can include a mode or configuration for which the touch sensing device can sense touch events, but not display any content on a display. For example, an electronic device with a touch screen can have a mode in which no content is displayed on the touch screen (e.g., the touch screen remains dark), but the touch screen is operative to detect touch events of the user.” Apple patent 20100328224
Rather than demanding users aim for where the onscreen controls would normally be found, the iPod nano – or, indeed, another touchscreen device – would instead respond to more generic inputs. For instance, a single tap could toggle between play/pause while double- or triple-taps could skip forward or backward. Tracing circles on the touchscreen could adjust the volume up or down.
Archos is on a roll today. After officially announcing, and making available for purchase the Archos 70 Internet tablet, the company has also released a pair of Personal Media Players. Smaller form factors, but with the Android Operating System (OS) tucked away inside, making the devices more than just your average MP3 or MP4 player. You’ll get to connect to friends, and play games, all on a small “tablet” device.
The press release, which you can read below, is actually pretty devoid of any actual real information regarding the devices themselves. However, their product page, which is where you’ll want to go if you want to purchase one of these little guys for yourself, tells us that the Archos 28 features a 2.8-inch capacitive touchscreen display, while the Archos 32 has a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen. The site also says that both of the PMPs will have Android 2.2 under the hood, ready to go.
Space wise, the Archos 28 will have either a 4GB or 8GB option, while the Archos 32 will have 8GB of memory. Both PMPs feature integrated WiFi, making sure that you’re able to connect to the Internet while you’re out and about, as long as you can find a hotspot. You’ll be able to play “3D games,” as well as make full use of applications. There’s also a video camera on the Archos 32, but not the 28. The Archos 28 will set you back $99.99, for the 4GB model, while the 32 costs $149.99
Press Release
ARCHOS 28 and 32 bring the Android revolution to MP3/MP4 player market with the first connected android PMP players starting from $99 On display January 6 – 9, 2011 at CES 2011, Las Vegas Convention Center, South Hall 2 Booth # 26425
Denver, Colorado – December 29, 2010 – ARCHOS, an award winning technology innovator and leader in the portable media player market today will show ARCHOS 28 and 32 pocket sized internet tablets at CES. The ARCHOS 28 and 32 internet tablets, revolutionize the world of MP3/MP4 players by adding a WiFi connection and the Android framework for the price of a standard MP3 player. With 8GB of storage, users can play and listen to over 4000 songs anywhere and with a variety of Android based applications they can also chat, game and partake in social networking from at home or on the go. These pocket sized tablets (28 internet tablet measures 3.9” x 2.1” x 0.35” and the 32 internet tablet measures 4.1” x 2.1” x 0.3”) are available for $99.99 MSRP for the ARCHOS 28 internet tablet and $149.99 MSRP for the ARCHOS 32 internet tablet at ARCHOS.com.
All You Can Play
Store, play and discover more music with free access to all the great music applications such as Napster. The ARCHOS 28 and 32 internet tablets allow you to discover new artists, listen to old favorites and have access to millions of songs. Users can easily access music from these open-platform MP3 players at a comparable price to MP3 players with closed platforms. ARCHOS also includes their Music Cover Carrousel, a built-in music application that allows users to browse through album covers and add widgets to the home screen for instant access to media controls.
“We are proud to release the first connected Android PMP players with the ARCHOS 28 and 32 internet tablets” says Henri Crohas, CEO and Founder. “MP3/MP4 users can now listen to their music while chatting and socializing with friends on the internet for an affordable price.”
More than a PMP player: stay connected with your Buddies
With Android as an operating system, application options are unlimited in these pocket size devices. Users will enjoy chatting, social networking and gaming with either of these tablets. Ebuddy, a preloaded app can be accessed directly from home and allows users to stay in touch with friends with ease. Photo fantastic’s can also easily capture their greatest memories and post them directly on their favorite social Media web site such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. There’s also an email application to stay in touch and users can play all the greatest games including 3D games thanks to the built-in accelerometer and 3D open GL technology. Lastly, multimedia fans can also enjoy playing their favorite videos.
For more information about the ARCHOS 28 and 32 internet tablets and other ARCHOS products visit www.ARCHOS.com.
About ARCHOS
ARCHOS released the first pocket-sized HD-based MP3 player with the Jukebox 6000 in 2000 and since that time has revolutionized consumer electronics devices. The company invented the portable media player in 2003 and was the first to bring television recording, wireless and touch screens to Portable Media Players. ARCHOS has also introduced the Internet Media Tablet range – the 5, 5g and 7 – offering users instant, uncompromising access to the internet, media content and TV. Established in 1988, ARCHOS has offices in the Unites States, Europe and Asia. ARCHOS is listed on Euronext Paris, Compartment B, ISIN Code FR0000182479. www.ARCHOS.com
Apple’s latest iPod nano hasn’t inspired quite the frenzied hack atmosphere as its iPod touch and iPhone siblings, but that doesn’t mean the tiny touchscreen PMP is completely devoid of modification. James Whelton won a nano and spent little time in cooking up an app hack; while so far he can’t add software to the PMP, he’s figured out how to modify the Springboard UI to remove apps.
Video demo after the cut
That involves bypassing the nano’s cache comparison, which would usually be watching for modified files and reverting them to clean versions if it spots anything that has been tampered with. The next step is making use of the Movies, TV Shows, Apps, Games, vCards, Calender events and other mentions in the nano’s plist.
Whelton is quick to point out that this isn’t a nano jailbreak, but perhaps the first steps towards more control over the nano’s file structure, apps and – eventually – a jailbreak solution:
“What I have also done is figured out a way for the iPod to boot with modified files (eg the SpingBoard Plist), bypassing the procedure it takes to stop this, I hope this will allow us to figure out a way to jailbreak it. I am primarily focusing on exposing some of the (for now) hidden features of the device” James Whelton
Cowon has finally got official on its long-rumored D3 PMP, and as teased it does indeed run Android. The Cowon D3 Plenue has a 3.7-inch WVGA AMOLED touchscreen display and uses Android 2.1, paired with WiFi b/g, Bluetooth 2.1 and a T-DMB TV tuner.
In fact, there’s a lot of tech you’d usually expected to find in a phone inside the D3, like an accelerometer and vibration feedback. There’s also a microSD card slot – augmenting 8GB, 16GB or 32GB of onboard storage – along with HDMI and USB 2.0 connectivity. It doesn’t look like Android Market access is included, but Cowon does throw in a Twitter and social networking app.
As you’d expect from Cowon, the list of supported file-types and codecs is huge, and includes 1080p Full HD support. No word on pricing at this stage, but audiophiles looking for an iPod touch alternative might find something here worth waiting for.
Samsung is readying a new PMP version of its Galaxy S family of Android smartphones, with the Samsung Galaxy Player YP-GB1 expected to make its debut at CES 2011 next month. The 4-inch WVGA PMP measures 9.9mm thick and uses a Super LCD display rather than Super AMOLED; it also loses the cellular connectivity, with WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 and GPS, though Samsung Hub says that does free up room for a T-DMB digital TV tuner.
There’s also a 3.2-megapixel rear-facing camera and a front-facing camera for video calls. The battery is a 1,200mAh unit, and there’s a microSD card slot along with Samsung’s 1GHz Hummingbird processor running Android 2.2 Froyo.
Interestingly, despite the lack of cellular connectivity, the Galaxy Player is supposed to have access to the Android Market (along with Samsung’s own app store). No word on pricing or availability at this stage.
Simplistic messaging company Peek is looking to move away from standalone hardware and instead position itself as a software provider for budget-smartphone and consumer electronics manufacturers. CEO Amol Sarva told GigaOm that Peek’s power-frugral software – which offers support for push-email, location-based services and basic social networking integration, all on 100MHz chips – is set to arrive on five phones in the next month, and on thirty by the end of 2011.
Peek has been working to make its software compatible with Qualcomm’s ultra-low cost BREW platform – as powering the HTC Smart – as well as on MediaTek chips. The combination, Sarva says, will see very low-end smartphones produced to take on emerging markets in India, Africa and Latin America, among others, with unsubsidized pricing reaching as little as $50. The software is designed to cope with the sort of patchy, non-3G coverage that is common in such markets.
“This is a huge opportunity for us. We’ve built technology that no one cared about but now we’re suddenly being approached by guys who have the hardware that want to make it smart.” Amol Sara, CEO, Peek
Meanwhile, Peek is apparently in talks with consumer electronics makers – including those responsible for digital photo frames, cameras, tablets, clock radios and PMPs – regarding using the same software and back-end services in upcoming devices. “If you’re a camera maker, you can put in 3G and move in the direction of a phone” Sarva says. The expectation is that revenue from software applications will eventually account for up to 80-percent of Peek’s business.
Cowon knows how to make Personal Media Players. They’ve got a myriad of the devices available now, with more coming down the pipe, and now it looks like one more is set to join the fray just in time to hit Christmas wish-list. Though, their newest effort isn’t just another PMP. This new device, aptly called the Cowon 3D, features glasses-free 3D technology, and still manages to pack in all of the other features people expect in their PMPs.
Of course, the company is saying that the Cowon 3D is the first 3D PMP available on the market. Much like the Nintendo 3DS, Cowon’s PMP is able to display 3D images to the user without the need for glasses. The Cowon 3D will also let you fully enjoy 1080p HD video, as well as through the output so you can enjoy it on your HDTV. You’ll be able to use the Cowon 3D to browse the Internet, look at your photos and videos, as well as listen to music.
The device features a 4.3-inch touchscreen display, with a resolution of 800 x 480, and it will come in sizes of 32GB or 64GB. For the 32GB, you’ll have to pay $430, and $510 for the 64GB version. Both of them are due to hit retail shelves some time in December. The big question, though, is whether or not the device is meant to convert standard 2D images into 3D ones, or if the device’s User Interface and 3D-based movies will be the only thing users experience in 3D.
Cowon has gone official in Korea with its latest PMP that looks more like a smartphone than a traditional PMP I am used to seeing called the X7. The thing has a 4.3-inch screen with no word on what the exact resolution of the thing is. It should make for some nice mobile video playback assuming the screen is decent.
The X7 can be had in 80GB, 102GB, and 160GB flavors with that capacity reached using a spinning HDD, not flash. I would assume these would be more fragile thanks to that point than other PMPs with flash-based storage.
Other features of the X7 include Bluetooth, a radio tuner, video playback with DivX support. The PMP also has TV-out capability and has a web browser. There is no mention of WiFi officially apparently, but a browser without WiFi makes little sense. The X7 will also sport a RSS reader. The X7 standard with 160GB of storage will be 339,000 won with the same PMP packing in seven optional dictionaries is selling for 379,000 won.
I was once stranded in Amsterdam for more than a week with my iPod nano and only 4 albums of music. I started the week at a Microsoft Mobius event, from which I got to visit Amsterdam coffeeshops with some fairly interesting and important people from Microsoft, Qualcomm and some of my other favorite tech blogs. After that event ended and most of my compatriots went home, I stuck around for a while to try to crash Nokia World, to which I was not actually invited or approved. In between, I had to wander the city and avoid getting into trouble.
I was using an ultraportable laptop at the time, and all of my music was kept on an external drive left behind at home. Because of a sync error the night before my trip, only one playlist was synchronized properly, and none of the rest of my library made the trip abroad. If I’m remembering correctly, the list included Radiohead’s “Kid A,” Saul Williams’ “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust,” M.I.A.’s “Kala” and Regina Spektor’s “Begin to Hope.” I listened to music a lot, all the time while riding the tram or walking the canals, but not while I was sitting in cafes, which play their own eclectic mix, or wandering through museums.
I had no iPod cable on me, and I wanted to avoid the Euro premium on buying a new one, so I decided not to charge my iPod. At the end of my 10-day trip, I was already tired of M.I.A. before her songs became sampled rap anthems, I had come to strange conclusions about Radiohead lyrics and autoerotic asphyxiation, and I still had plenty of juice left on my nano.
I loved that nano. I bought the iPod nano while I worked for the Apple Store, using the modest Apple employee discount. It lasted years until it was lost in a quick series of cross-country moves. I had owned an iPod mini before, and I liked the mini, but there is something so thin and so perfect about the form of the iPod nano, the two are more like cousins than long lost siblings.
When the fourth generation nano came out, returning to the long slim form factor from the short, stubby third generation, I bought one in purple. At the fifth generation, my Web site needed to replace a stolen iPod we used for testing, so I bought a nano with a video camera. When I left that site, I was happy to give the nano back.
The iPod nano has become a fascinating case study in Apple’s sometimes puzzling “If it ain’t broke, fix it” philosophy of product development. When the first nano was launched, it replaced the iPod mini, which was, at the time, the best selling MP3 player on the global market. Apple ditched the colorful mini for the black and white shell of the nano. It was a bold move, but it paid off. Of course, the transition to a much slimmer, smaller device based on solid state storage instead of a spinning hard disk drive was obvious. What came next? The strangest roller coaster ride in Apple’s iPod history.
Think about Apple’s product lineup. Apple moves remarkably slowly in its product designs. My current, 2010 Macbook Pro looks remarkably similar to the one I bought in 2003. Apple hasn’t changed its pro desktop in about as many years. Even the iMac stagnates for years. The iPod classic an obvious design successor to the original iPod. The iPod touch hasn’t changed its look in four generations. But there have been four different iPod nano designs in four years. For Apple, that’s a frenetic pace.
A couple weeks ago, before another trip to Europe (London, then Amsterdam again), I needed to replace my nano. My son, a toddler with a propensity for things that light up, had smashed it against the granite floors once too many times, though the nano put up a great fight. Lucky me, Apple had just released its newest iPod nano, the sixth generation touchscreen iPod, and I sprang at the excuse to buy one. There were a number of colors to choose from.
My first indication of trouble should have been the lack of purple.
After a couple weeks with the new iPod nano, I’ve come to realize the mistakes Apple has made with the iPod nano line. The iPod nano is a pure music player. At its best, that is what the nano does well. It stores music. It’s easy to find and organize your music, and maybe even discover some lost tracks. It’s simple to control on the fly, and it lasts forever. If an iPod nano does all of those things, for that alone we should be thankful.
Forget the video camera. The nano with the video camera was a stopgap until Apple figured out just how it wanted to play the iPod touch with a camera and FaceTime capabilities. It was never meant to last. The exercise features are great, like the pedometer and Nike+ support, but forget about using the accelerometer for stupid extras. If I bump my nano and it accidentally changes tracks, that’s a lousy feature.
Forget video playback and even photo viewing. All I care about is music, and I don’t even need much music on a nano. Just a week’s worth. 8GB of storage is enough, 16GB is plentiful. 8GB of storage is more than 111 hours of music. That’s enough for me. I don’t care about stuffing every song I own in my pocket, at least not on a simple business trip.
The new iPod nano is a nightmare. It looks cool, and that’s all it does well. At one event, I used it as a name tag. It was very geeky, and it caught a lot of attention. As a journalist, I like geeky, but I’m not interested in generating attention for myself, so I broke out the nano at parties only.
Want to skip tracks on the new nano? I skip around all the time depending on mood. On the new device, you have to unlock the screen. Oh, wait, is your nano turned upside down? You need to figure out which way to hold it so you can see the screen properly. If you have the clock set as a default screen, you have to swipe it aside. Finally, you get the music controls. That doesn’t sound like too much, but repeat that process every single time, and you’ll soon hate this little player. On the old nano, to skip tracks you just hit a button. You don’t even need to look at the player, the track wheel is easy to control without looking.
There was a time, a couple years ago, when tech journalists started asking each other if touchscreens were such an improvement. It seemed like every manufacturer was adding touch to their MP3 players, phones, laptops, etc, and calling it the next big thing. But touch doesn’t make a device better, it just adds a new input method.
The thing is, Apple’s old input method, the click wheel, was perfect. It was revolutionary. The click wheel and the small new hard disk drives were the two main factors in the original iPod’s success. It offered a lot of music and it was easy to control. The nano was the perfect embodiment of that philosophy. It was a great form, but it never got in the way of function. Is there a better compliment to industrial design than to say that it can disappear? The last generation iPod nano disappeared when you used it. The experience was all about the music, and the iPod only helped to get you there faster.
The new iPod nano is about showing off touch technology. Multi-touch on a 1.6-inch touchscreen? I can barely fit two fingers on the screen, let alone spread them apart for a multi-touch gesture. The interface is lousy. It slows down the process of finding and playing music. It forces you to look at the screen, to deliberate, and perhaps to enjoy the pretty icons and the rotating screen gesture.
The iPod nano is Apple’s hubris laid bare. It’s all about form, with almost no regard for function. It’s about adding the newest features, without asking whether those features are actually an improvement. It’s about making something thinner and smaller that was already thin and small enough. There’s a point of diminishing returns in the size of an object, where it starts to get more difficult to use as it gets smaller. The iPod nano is too small to use easily.
Oh, nano, how I miss you. I miss our transatlantic flights and sitting on a bench with you in Leidseplein, eating a croquette. I miss hearing you sing, without having to look at your bright and smiling face shining back every time I changed the tune. I miss your perfect shape, palm sized, but thin and sharp in the hand. You survived heat and cold, chewing and drops onto concrete, but eventually succumbed to an intense beating. I might try to find a refurbished iPod nano while they’re still available, but until then, at least I have my Zune.
We’ve seen the iPod touch and the iPod shuffle bare their silicon souls under iFixit’s relentless gaze; now it’s the turn of the final new 2010 iPod, the iPod nano, to get torn apart. iFixit has flexed its usual screwdriver and spudger – together with a heat gun to melt the glue that holds the screen in place – and discovered that the nano’s guts are a 50/50 mixture of logic board and battery.
That’s basically as they found inside the shuffle, though of course the nano’s logic board is more complex so as to include the necessary driver for the 1.54-inch touchscreen display. Along the way they’ve come across the usual flourishes: for instance, the glass protrudes 0.3mm from the chassis of the nano, which they assume is to allow Apple to keep the main body of the iPod as narrow as possible.
Interestingly, at 220ppi the iPod nano’s display has the second highest pixel density of any Apple device, just falling behind the Retina Display on the iPhone 4 and fourth-gen iPod touch. If you’d rather know how the nano holds up as a media player, of course, check out our full review from earlier this week.
