On to the real stuff now. I printed off the thirteen page Wikipedia entry on the iPod. With this much length, I was bound to find information that you and I both didn't know. The following is some very interesting material on the beloved iPod.
Apple's reasoning for making the iPod was because the company found existing digital music players as "big and clunky or small and useless". These players also had interfaces that were "unbelievably awful". I was quite young at the time, but I am sure this was definitely the case from viewing some of those older players. The first generation iPod was developed in under one year by a team of engineers. The greatness of this device is now clearly known. As of September 2007, there had been more than 150 million iPods sold worldwide. This made it the best-selling digital audio player series in history!
The iPod has been known for its ease of functions and graphical interface. This was not all developed in-house though. Apple originally contracted Pixo to help design and implement the user interface under the supervision of Steve Jobs. The interface has been described as "uncluttered and minimalistic". With time, Apple began to refine this interface on their own. Another way that the iPod is so user friendly is in the variance of file types that it supports. For audio, the devices support MP3, AAC/M4A, AIFF, WAV, and more. For pictures, JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, and PNG formats are all supported.
The creation of the iTunes store in 2003 helped pushed popularity of the device as well. Here, one can find a huge collection of mainline and rare music. They can purchase individual songs for 99 cents a piece, or full CD album's for $9.99. Eventually, movies and other forms of media were for sale in the iStore. All of the audio files purchased off of Apple's store contain added encryption. The encryption only allows the file to be put on a few # of computers. For some, this is a negative, but it does help to prevent illegal p2p sharing. One is not limited to the program of iTunes or its store though, there have been many third party applications created that can serve all of these functions for your iPod use.
A few other bits of material you may find intriguing:
-There is a huge market of accessories for the iPod. The main companies for these are Belkin and Griffin.
-iPods originally connected and charged using FireWire. All models now use USB for this.
-The first car company to have iPod integration in their vehicles was BMW.
-There have been three different generations of the earbuds that come along with your iPod. The first two generations have been described as too bulky and not as comfortable.
-iPods have gained popularity for use in education. In the fall of 2004, Duke University offered all incoming freshman an iPod. This has also been done at Abilene Christian University in TX with the iPhone and iTouch models (*see previous post*).
To learn more and use collective intelligence- Wikipedia: iPod entry
1 comment:
So what do we have to do to get them issued here at NDSU?? By the way, great integration of Jenkins and how collective intelligence is used to create Wikipedia. Very informative post! By the way, I haven't read all of your posts recently so I'm not sure if you have covered this or not yet, but I'm might be in the market to buy an iPod. What do I need to look for and what's the difference between them?
Post a Comment