Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

It's time for the occasional obligatory music post. My musical tastes are probably less sophisticated than yours, so feel free to turn up your nose now. At least my tastes are eclectic.

I've noticed that way that I've been introduced to music has changed drastically in the last few years. With the omnipresence of the Internet and the fact that I'm rarely anywhere near a radio, my exposure to new music is not really that mainstream.

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I've been reading for weeks about an imminent iPod phone. OK, fair enough ... I guess it's a cell phone that you can also use for listening to your music.

I've also been reading rumors or conjectures of an iPod video, along with accompanying videos for sale by the Apple Store. Considering that iTunes already supports videos, it's not a big stretch.

But what I would like to do is go out on a limb and offer one more prediction. What happens when you combine the notion of the state-of-the-art cell phone (with picture-taking capability standard fare these days) with QuickTime and its H.264 compression, which Apple touts as being great for mobile phones?

A video (ipod) phone, with audio/video recording, not just playback. (And perhaps more far-fetched, transmission — now we're talking beyond Dick Tracy).

Why would they do this? Because the whole "iPod Phone" and/or "iPod Video" is not that particularly interesting. The former, as it is currently speculated, is just combining two items into one package, the only real opportunity for synergy is ringtones. The latter is just an evolutionary step (Heck, it's practically been done already), and it's not like a tiny handheld TV is very useful or exciting. So for this new thing to be interesting, it has to be thinking way outside the box.

That's just my prediction. Take it or leave it.