Wireless iPod

[evildan]

Yes, I'd like to have a wireless iPod.

Yes, keep the cable for charging the battery, that's obvious, but what about wireless transfer.

You're iPod enters the room of the host machine, Rendezvous picks it up and iTunes can share that music, just as machines do now.

Not only that, but transferring music to it would be a snap. No wires, for file transfer. It just makes sense, it's the next logical step for all devices.

Is this crazy?

[brianleahy]

A bluetooth version should be do-able.

However, the trouble with wireless connections is that they use a lot of power - especially if you want them to be always alert for a wireless xfer opportunity. So it'd probably take a heavy toll on battery life.

On the other hand, it might work ok if you had a button or menu choice to start a bluetooth xfer.

However, rest assured it would be a LOT slower than firewire.

[adambyte]

Is Bluetooth even fast enough to transfer that amount of data for continuous playback? Obviously not AIFF files, but could bluetooth even do mp3 or aac?

[evildan]

What about an airport card installed? I be you could strip one down and toss it into an iPod... WiFi would work...

[mr. k]

The only problem with wireless transfers is at this point in time they would be slow as molasses - the firewire on iPod's right now can do about 400mb (megabit's) a second, and that's quick. The new firewire standard, FireWire 800, can do about double that, and will probably be the next transfer method for the iPod.
Airport Extreme (in other words 802.11G, the most advanced WiFi standard to date) can do at mac 54mb/second, making it about eight times slower then firewire 400.
I don't see it being feasible - but I do think that apple could come up with a really cool use for wireless in the iPod, like rendezvous enabled realtime music streaming from ipod to iPod. So your on the train in the morning, the guy in the next car has an iPod, you get yours out, it beeps and shows you that there's a music library avaliable, you bust out his playlist and find something you like...
That sure would be cool - or networked games or something...

[brianleahy]

I think 802.11 (i.e. Airport) is a more complex protocol than Bluetooth, in that it includes a complete "networking stack" as it is called. To be sure, it might be POSSIBLE to bolt Airport onto an iPod, but firmware mods would be needed, and it'd very processor-demanding.

Bluetooth has at least enough bandwidth that it can be (and is) used for voice-quality bidirectional audio in bluetooth equipped phone/headset combinations, so it ought to be possible to use bluetooth for realtime stereo audio.

However, bluetooth is usually pretty short-range, so to use it, you'd probably be close enough to just plug your headphones straight into the computer doing the transmission!

[mr. k]

Ok here are some snippets from http://www.csr.com/enews/sw007.html:

The Bluetooth wireless communications scheme has a theoretical maximum data transfer of 723 kbps.

The range of a low-power Bluetooth device is about 10 metres.

The higher power devices can give you up to 100 metres range. These are just guidelines though - some designers have reported success at up to one mile across an unobstructed connection.

So an optimized, and relatively well powered bluetooth iPod could stream in realtime a 96KB encoded AAC file, but even that would be a stretch due to the difference between kilobits and KILOBYTES.
Because a byte is 8 time bigger then a bit (I think... but am fairly sure) a 128KB encoded AAC file would need a bandwidth of about 1050 mbit/second.
So I think that a lot of bluetooth related features on the iPod will have to wait until a better standard arrives to even be considered.

[malexgreen]

Here are the features I'd like to see in the 4G iPod:

Stereo bluetooth headset support
FM/AM radio build in
Can play WMA music format
EDGE or other high speed cellular support to enable wireless distrubution of music for 3G celleluar networks.