Wireless iPod

evildan

evildan

Super Moderator
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?
 
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.
 
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?
 
What about an airport card installed? I be you could strip one down and toss it into an iPod... WiFi would work...
 
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...
 
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!
 
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.
Click to expand...
The range of a low-power Bluetooth device is about 10 metres.
Click to expand...
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
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.
 
It would take forever to sync your iPod with your Mac over Bluetooth. Airport would take less time, but you'd need the network set up. And I doubt Bluetooth would have enough bandwidth to stream music, as others have stated, unless the iPod sampled the files down in realtime as it streamed them.

Malex: The rumored iTunes 5 will supposedly support Windows Media files, so the next version of the iPod may support them as well. And I believe you mean the 40 GB iPod...
 
The range could be short, because the justification for wireless would be that you simply wouldn't have to plug anything in until your battery gets low. (Except for headphones of course).

I got the idea when I was crawling under a desk looking for the firewire port on the back of a mac at work. What a pain. Just to use the iPod as a drive to grab one file from my desktop.

If I had wireless, I could have just turned on the iPod and transferred the info wirelessly. Because I was out with friends and knew this stop was happening, I had to carry that wire around with me all day.

Music transfer would also be very cool. I could see turning the wireless feature on and off with a toggle switch or even a menu item in the GUI.

And I guess my point is that range really isn't an issue. Because you'd want to be up and close. You wouldn't want to be in the next room or anything.
 
Originally posted by arden
It would take forever to sync your iPod with your Mac over Bluetooth. Airport would take less time, but you'd need the network set up. And I doubt Bluetooth would have enough bandwidth to stream music, as others have stated, unless the iPod sampled the files down in realtime as it streamed them.

Malex: The rumored iTunes 5 will supposedly support Windows Media files, so the next version of the iPod may support them as well. And I believe you mean the 40 GB iPod...
Click to expand...

4G is 4th generation
 
So, the verdict is: Not right now. Bluetooth is clearly too slow to synch your iPod, WiFi is too complex for the tiny device right now - as well as much slower, anyway...

If you really want to 'stream' your iPod's music: Just add an FM-add on that sends your music through the radio. ;-) iTrip is good, I hear.

As for the features I'd want in the next iPod: _Integrated_ mic for voice recording. Better yet: Stereo microphone, adjustable in software for room recordings. I want to record my reading sessions like that... :p

And yes: An FM receiver would be great. Recording should also be enabled, of course.
 
I fully agree with fryke: stereo directonal mike, recording... and the possibility to connect a camera with USB to download the pictures to the HD (no card reader.... just the camera interface) !

400 MB/s wireless... this can be done with laser diodes. Don't expect it to be low-power in any near future.
 
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