iPod SD – put an iPod into a zillion PDAs/Smartphones instantly
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Not a day passes without someone predicting the demise of Apple’s iPod. This week, however, Bill Gates gave an interview to a german newspaper saying that “iPod’s success is unsustainable in the long run”. Billg definitely knows a thing or two about creating enduring platfroms.
Interestingly, exactly one week prior to that, Robert Cringely of PBS came out with the theory that Apple will ultimately pull out of the iPod manufacturing business and start licensing clones. Again, students of competitive strategy know that 40%+ profit margins are unsustainable in the long run. So probably Robert could be onto something here.
Hadley Stern at Apple Matters, joined the dialog and supported parts of Billg’s claim about smartphones overtaking iPods. Hadley’s statement on Nextel, Verizon blocking the iTunes mobile version got me thinking – if the smartphone market is going to be so crucial, what can Apple do to bypass these wireless companies but still have a presence in the smartphone market ?
As many of have observed, Apple is slowly coming off the high horse and targeting the mass market with products like iPod Shuffle and Mac Mini. I started looking at the iPod Shuffle’s design closely. Thanks to IDC’s IdaRose Sylvester who opened up the iPod Shuffle and identified the key components – a Sigmatel STMP3550 chip
(costs $7.50 volume pricing) and a Samsung 512MB/1GB Flash memory chip. (costs $31 for 512MB volume pricing).
The Sigmatel is a MP3 Player on a chip and it has a lot more capabilities that Apple could put to use in later models. But the size of the chip caught my attention.
Jason Striegel at Hack A Day had dissected the iPod Shuffle and shown the innards clearly. However, this picture on a japanese site gave me the key idea and I started looking at the dimensions of the iPod Shuffle. About half the Shuffle is for the battery and the other half houses the entire MP3 player mechanism sandwich. Here are the dimensions in MM:
25 x 84 x 8.4 iPod Shuffle
20 X 12.4 X 1.2 Samsung Flash chip
22.20 X 22.20 X 1.2 Sigmatel STMP3550 Mp3 player Chip.
If you look at the MP3 player sandwich it is approximately 23X23X7.4 inside the casing. The primary idea I was trying to explore was to see if we could produce an iPod in the SD card form factor which is 24 X 32 X 2.1 MM.
I had seen SDIO devices from companies like Pretec that could be connected to smartphones. So I decided to create a picture of what a iPod SD could look like. I took the Shuffle’s Picture from Apple’s site, Cropped the middle part that houses the battery. I have given the resultant diagram below. for comparison, i added the SD Card in actual size. 
As you can see the modified iPod Shuffle is almost the size of the SD card except for the depth which can be handled by housing it like the Pretec SDIO devices. Also I figured Apple could use the Sandisk USB in SD design (pictured to the right) so that it could go from Smartphone to Computer without cables. The power of course would come from the cell phone’s battery. If the iPod SDIO really existed it could instantly be added to a Smartphone (based on Palm OS or PocketPC OS) with a SD slot with SDIO capability, and iTunes mobile software could take advantage of the GPRS/EDGE or EVDO services so that customers could directly access the iTunes store and download songs completely bypassing the wireless company but using the data service offered by the wireless company. Now wouldn’t that take the fight to the smartphone market?
Treo 650 has a measly 23MB of memory available. So adding 512MB or 1GB through this method would be cool. Also if the Smartphone is like the latest Samsung with 3GB storage (although Samsung uses Transflash slot, this idea could be extended), the iPod SDIO could use its internal flash chip just for buffering but store the tunes on the smartphone’s internal hard disk. the SDIO support in Palm OS and PocketPC OS has been around for a few years. So many PDAs now have SDIO slots – Sandisk has a pretty good list here.
Although this list is for SDWIFI, SDWIFI requires SDIO capability. This means that an entire class of PDAs now will have iPod SD. Most PDAs use a software based MP3 player (costing $15-20) and most legacy PDAs don’t have more than 64MB built-in. So by using iPod SD, these will get a hardware MP3 player and storage of 512MB/1GB.
Since Apple does not need a battery inside iPod SD, maybe they will sell these for $60-75. That would be one cool add-on for all iPod loving PDA owners. I think if Apple creates something like iPod SD, it will make iPods dramatically more ubiquitous making the platfform more sticky.
Of course, Apple will still have to open the API up for real stickiness, but this will be a start.
