You're allowed to consider this a petty attempt at getting this back on
topic but maybe we can get interesting ideas out.
I mostly agree with Michael Wittmann's view of the "Digital Hub" that the
iPod is supposed to be a part of. The main trend of all this is extreme
portability. Supposedly, we know something about this.
Nanotechnology can become absurd, but there's clearly a market for small
"digital devices" with average functionalities. The challenge here might be
meeting the right smallness/features ratio. Some NTLKers eventually defect
to the Rest of the PDA World because of our green friends' sizes. Should
tell us something about the value of size as a measure of convenience.
Now for some personal thoughts on the iPod. I'll be leaving for
ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa where I'll record music during
outdoor ceremonies. I'll bring an iceBook and an MD recorder with good
quality microphones, along with my Newt for textual data. As you can guess,
I was hoping The Device would be a better version of the NOMAD or Archos,
meant for recording. Although it's not so far from this, I'm as
disappointed as probably most of us are. Direct-to-disk recording is now so
incredibly easy and a FireWire connection would have made a recording iPod
so incredibly relevant. iPod 2 might become an audio Newt... Problem is, I
can't wait until Apple builds it as I'm leaving in January.
Alex Enkerli
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
Indiana University
-- This is the Newtontalk mailinglist - http://www.newtontalk.net To unsubscribe or manage: visit the above link or mailto:newtontalk-request_at_newtontalk.net?Subject=unsubscribe
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Nov 01 2001 - 10:02:36 EST