FOCUS On Broadband Wireless Internet Access And WiMAX Newsletter Issue 0017

Published by Stroh Publications, LLC

Independent, original, in-depth coverage of the trends and technologies shaping the Broadband Wireless Internet Access / WiMAX industry

Recipient of Part-15.Org’s 2002 Wireless Advocate Of The Year Award

Steve Stroh, Editor
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FOCUS On Broadband Wireless Internet Access And WIMAX
Issue 0017 / 2007-01

In This Issue:
The Quiet Connectivity Revolution Gets Noisy

The Quiet Connectivity Revolution Gets Noisy

In the last issue of FOCUS On Broadband Wireless Internet Access (now named FOCUS On Broadband Wireless Internet Access And WiMAX), the topic was "We're In The Midst Of A Quiet Connectivity Revolution". That was mid-2005, and it's now late 2007, and the Quiet Connectivity Revolution has gotten considerably noisier. So I thought it was appropriate to pick up where I left off.

The Wi-Fi iPod
Much of the last issue of FOCUS was devoted to describing an evolution of Apple iPod that I thought was imminent - an iPod with integrated Wi-Fi, the key feature of which it could download content directly from the iTunes Store (then called the iTunes Music Store) using a Wi-Fi Internet connection. In my vision of the "Wi-Fi iPod", the most interesting content for a Wi-Fi iPod would be podcasts. In the current implementations of the iPhone and iPod Touch (since the Wi-Fi capability of the two units is equivalent, for the sake of brevity, I'll call the pair "iPhoneTouch), there are two key things in my vision that are missing from the iPhoneTouch: 1) the ability to download podcasts (the only download that's "allowed" directly from an iPhoneTouch is music... and ringtones), 2) the ability to automatically download podcasts on a schedule, when there's connectivity, or when there's new content. These capabilities are in the iTunes (desktop) software, but one has to dock their iPhone or iPod Touch via cable to download such content - you can't even connect between your desktop iTunes and the iPhoneTouch. It's not like Apple doesn't know how to handle moving protected content via Wi-Fi because they do it quite well with the AppleTV product which doesn't allow you direct access to the iTunes store, only the content already present on a iTunes computer on the same network.

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