Marc Palmer

The announcement of Apple’s new iPod Touch changes everything.

The iPhone came out, "wow! full Safari?!" we all said. The device was priced high but we knew this would garner us some new Safari web hits on sites we develop, and that we would "need to start" looking at developing sites that work well on the reduced screen size.

Apple should be selling millions of iPhones per year soon, but they already sell millions more iPods. And now the iPod touch brings Safari and wifi to the palms of pretty much anyone who would buy a hi-spec iPod previously (caveat: capacity is currently a fraction of the now-called iPod classic).

This means several things.

First, we’re going to have to support smaller displays with our sites. iPhone and iPod Touch together will make a significant market share in the months and years to come.

Second, Safari’s market share in terms of site hits is very likely to rocket – provided people provide content that people want when they are out and about. Suddenly Safari may impinge on Firefox and IE’s share very rapidly. It all depends on the browser experience on such a small device, but by all accounts it is great.

You may say it’s only in the high-cost iPod Touch. But we know, apart from the Shuffle, Apple roll all the features of the top-end down to the low-end models over time. Who will really be that surprised if they find a way to do an iPod Nano fullscreen with single or multi-touch.

"Oh… and one more thing." How long before there’s a new iPod headphone kit with built-in mic, and Skype for Mac adapted to and running on the iPod Touch? Ooops, wi-fi phone by stealth. Who needs iPhone?

No related posts.