Next Generation of iPods to have Wi-Fi?

Zephyr14z writes "A TMCnet article states that Apple has filed a patent for iPods that can purchase music wirelessly over the internet. This was an expected feature in the Zune, though it turns out not to be true. 'While this could be an effort to fight the software giant and its product directly, it should be noted that Zune's built-in Wi-Fi will be limited to the file sharing between devices with no direct Internet purchases from the handheld,' says Campbell."

Re:How about play in USB mode?

[yivi]

You can play your iPod while connected to the computer. Just click on the "eject" button in iTunes, and it will keep charging from the USB connection, but the interface will be "unlocked" so you can use it.

And the comment about the battery meter is just stupid.

uh, ok

[Anonymous Coward]

If you run linux or some other *nix like I do (I'm assuming so since you say you dont have itunes), just type "eject $PATH_TO_IPOD_DEVICE" for example "eject /dev/sda" Thatll do the trick.

Oh, and a quick check using df (if you have some form of automounting going on) or a check with dmesg when you plug it in should give you the path

Not in my experience

[NixLuver]

I've had iRivers, Creatives, Sansas, Sonys - no Cowan, so I'll have to give it a wash on that one. But all in all, I've had eight different manufacturer's digital audio player, and frankly, my iPod sounds the best by far. Side-by-side plug/unplug cycles convinced me and many others who happened to be around for a test. (Started at a party where a friend said his MDplayer smoked the iPod for audio quality... even he agreed that he was wrong after a direct plug-unplug audio test). None of them has had the functionality of my iPod, nor the sound quality. I don't care about 'hip' - in fact, it was that fact - that the iPod was 'hip' - that kept me from buying one until last year.

Re:Just imagine

[argent]

I don't know, but one thing I have noticed is that you can get some cool features in flash mp3 players in Asia that you can't get in the US that I've been able to tell. One is the ability to "dock" two players together by their USB ports and transfer songs that way. Hmmm...

Re:How about play in USB mode?

[sydsavage]

Part of the problem with the battery life is the amount of buffering the thing does. It tries to read entire songs into memory and shut off the HD, FOR EVERY SONG YOU PLAY. Which is wasteful if you skip from one song to the next to find the perfect one for the time being....

This is mostly false. The iPod fills it's buffer with the next songs in the playlist, not one song at a time. Even if it's on shuffle play, it reads ahead the next songs it has cued up. Twenty minutes of buffering is usually five or six songs, depending on song length.

You are correct that choosing a new song or playlist that wasn't cued will force the harddrive to spin up again, but that's what playlists are for, specifically the on-the-go playlists. In actual usage, when I do skip around a bit, I haven't noticed a significant shortening of battery life, but I don't find myself switching around after every single song, either.