Apple Nano, and Harry Porter

After the initial shock of seeing this ipod-beauty, the fact of it being flash based concerns me, especially since this is supposed to be a full blown ipod in terms of feature-set.

Flash memory, by the nature of it, imposes a write limit. You can only rewrite it so many times before the whole thing goes useless. Now, as an MP3 player, this should be fine especially given that Ipod does syncing to only write when new songs are added, and they're doing a very good job on that.

The problem arises when you try to use it as a firewire (or in this case, USB2) harddrive. I do that all the time with my 20 gig ipod 3rd gen, and there's something to be said about putting all your large media files on the ipod to free up laptop harddrive space.

Imagine doing that with Ipod Nano.

So, we're essentially one feature short of a full-blown ipod feature set, and in my opinion a major one at that.

Don't get me wrong. This thing is marvoulous, and I can't wait to get me one of those. But just so that everyone's clear on it not being a harddisk, or your ipod will die a quick (and I'm sure painful) death in a couple of months.

While we're at the topid of Apple Media event, it's interesting that Harry Porter Audio Books are here, and look it, exclusive ITMS only. I wonder how that plays out between Audible and ITMS. Audible has some kind of deal with apple to distribute spoken word contents on ITMS, and ITMS certainly is the biggest distrubution channel Audible.

The relationship between supplier and distributor lies on the delicate balance between the two parties. Delicate balance basically boils down to none of the two should try to go around the back to screw the other.

It's almost always the case that ITMS supplies music they distribute, and their spoken word contents provided by Audible. With this Harry Porter exclusive deal, Apple risk to offend Audible. While Audible probably wouldn't do anything to show their displeasure anything soon, there's nothing to really stop them from making a whole lot of high-demand spoken-word contents exclusive to Audible, taking them away from ITMS, and therefore one less incentive for people to get ipod. Nothing's going to stop them from working with Microsoft against Apple if they're pissed off bad enough.

In the end, it's going to be interesting to see how it turns out in the long run. Remember, ITMS isn't really there to make big bucks, it's there to get people to buy ipods. With that in mind, there's really no reason for Apple to start competing with Audible.