“Apple had a strangely quiet 30th birthday over the weekend, but it hasn’t been staying in and watching Pixar films – according to a UK retailer we’ve been speaking to, it’s been adding the finishing touches to a Bluetooth iPod,” Mark Wilson writes for Stuff Magazine. “Rumours of a ‘Pod with the wireless tech built-in reached fever pitch in February 2005, but it looks like the jukebox is finally ready to appear in the Apple store, along with a deluge of accessories.”
“Chief among these would likely be a pair of Bluetooth headphones… There are also some potentially nefarious uses that’d explain why the concept’s been so long in the making. You could transfer tunes wirelessly between iPods or, even better, create a personal radio broadcast that people sitting near you on the bus could tune into,” Wilson writes. “One thing a Bluetooth iPod 1.0 probably won’t include is ultrawideband, the new super-fast, video-streaming version of the wireless tech that could in future let you stream films to TVs around the home from your little jukebox.”
Full article here.
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Related articles:
New iPod coming soon? Apple places 60GB 5G iPod on 60-day ‘at risk’ list – March 17, 2006
Generator Research: Apple to Ship $4.2bn in Wireless iPods (WiPods) by 2010 – March 14, 2006
Ready for your wireless Apple iPod? – February 09, 2006
Sounds more plausible than the rumored “REAL iPod VIDEO.” I just don’t believe they will change the form factor to a full touch screen quite yet..
It also explains why retailers have been notified that the current 60 gig will be discontinued while the 30 gig remains…. The high end model will most likely include bluetooth.
The only thing that worries me is how easily you would be able to lose the wireless headphones (hopefull they don’t change). Unless that Headphone holder (There’s a link to Apple’s patent and pics, but I don’t have it.) is used. Still, you would still be able to lose the holder, too……
Now that I;m thinking about it, they woule have to change the design because if they fell out of your ears for one reason or another, it would be bad if they fell on the floor, and somehting happened to them or you lose them, so I guess they’d have to redo the headphone thing- I’ll miss those white buds though
Man, I hope they do something to take care of the battery drain that Bluetooth has on a device…..
i would want to see a blue tooth HiFi to along with this, so you could cary your ipod around the house with you as the ultimate remote and have that get streamed to the stereo.
headphones big enough to put a battery in? no thanks. bluetooth is cool and all but I would never walk around like those dudes with the bluetooth headsets for there phones. File trans… tooooo slowwww. Mabye for other stuff I guess.
Yup, and the BT will also scratch your back and massage you at a push of a button. Who the heck needs BT in headphones. This is totally stupid!
Apple, make a PDA phone, PLEEEAASE! I’ll take BT in that!
story as in Apple PDA phone will make a big story (and sales)
“The only thing that worries me is how easily you would be able to lose the wireless headphones”
Why is this a concern? You can lose your cell phone, your Nano, your car keys, just as easily as a pair of bluetooth headphones. What you really are talking about is wanting some assurance that nothing bad in life will ever happen. It’s just not Apple’s problem if people don’t take care of their personal belongings.
Of course someone will figure out a way to sue them for losing them since no one wants to take responsibility for any of their own behavior.
Hey OzzysCross101 . . .
If you ever drop your wireless Bluetooth headphones into a river of molten lava, forget em’, cause, man, they’re gone.
This is obviously bullcrap…
“You could transfer tunes wirelessly between iPods”
Yeah sure… Don’t think the Record Label are going to like this feature. This sounds like sh*t.
MW: Play. Your tunes ain’t gonna play long with bluetooth.
We get talk of an iPod dock in the mini but we got the Boombox with dock instead, and none in the mini. It always seems that what we hear is only partly right, either via Chinese whispers or deliberate mis-information. I wonder if this will be the case here too.
CandTsmac? BT 2 file transfer is 2.1 Mbps, that’s faster than most cable or DSL services, so it’s hardly slow. Somehow, I doubt anyone would put BT in a current device using the ancient BT 1.0 standard.
BT 2/EDR rocks!
Anybody notice that the apple site is not loading images?!
New Products coming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
zzzzzzz as in: Not the first time that US is fast asleep when there’s a lot happening.
While BlueTooth headphones are a reality, I don’t think that Apple will be getting too excited about catering for them. It involves a lot of trouble and expense, merely to eliminate a few feet of wire between your pocket and your ears.
The killer application for a BlueTooth iPod is in-car audio. If a car radio has an appropriate BlueTooth interface, it will wirelessly handle data and audio from cellphones, satellite navigation systems and entertainment devices.
Unlike FM transmitters, which are of limited value and are illegal in many countries, BlueTooth is internationally useable and already widely used. The big difference between FM transmitters and a BlueTooth system is that you get good quality two-way operation. The audio system plays your tunes, the existing steering wheel controls will operate the iPod and the car radio display can show you the tracks that you’re playing.
More and more car manufacturers are adopting BlueTooth systems, so it will become universally available very rapidly.
Once it takes off, you will also see home stereo systems offering similar features.
Ho-hum.
no one will have lengths of wire coming out of your ears in the future, itll all be wireless. its only a matter of time, and i wouldnt be surprised to see apple do it first in an mp3 player.
some of you are just holding onto the notion that headphones have to have wires coming out of them.
we’ll look back in a few short years and see images of people with todays earphones and think ‘thats so old school’.
While BlueTooth headphones are a reality, I don’t think that Apple will be getting too excited about catering for them. It involves a lot of trouble and expense, merely to eliminate a few feet of wire between your pocket and your ears.
What am I the only one who snags their earbud’s cord on every possible item? I can’t even count how many times they’ve caught on something and been yanked out of my ears!
Django, I’m not saying that Apple won’t be catering for BlueTooth headphones, I just feel that the compelling reason for a BlueTooth iPod is with in-car audio.
Wired earbuds can be inconvenient, but BlueTooth solutions can be too. Obviously they need a battery and some electronics, so they must be bigger than passive earbuds and will need to have an arrangement for recharging them. It’s unlikely that everything that’s needed could currently be built into earbuds themselves, so you could have two earbuds wired to a small unit – which is going to have many of the drawbacks associated with using iPods and cabled earbuds.
The ear-worn BlueTooth hands-free units might appear to be a tempting way forward, but existing cellphone ones don’t acoustically connect to the ear in a similar way to an earbud. It would be difficult to transmit high quality sound to the ear canal unless the transducer was pretty well inside the ear and forming an airtight seal. That might mean that they weren’t practical for some people due to the shape of their ears.
Alternatively, users might like lightweight headphones with built-in BlueTooth. That might well be the most practical solution, but unless they fold in a very clever manner, they will be very bulky to carry when you’re not listening. A folding design might be more prone to breakages.
There are ways around many of the drawbacks that I have raised, so an individual who really wanted to, could probably make it work for them. But Apple always favours universally applicable solutions and I think that BlueTooth for personal wearing as opposed to for in-car audio involves too many compromises and complexities. It’s possible, but is it brilliant enough to get Steve’s approval ?
I’m not sure just how much I’d trust this original article anyway. Apple does a pretty good job of keeping new projects under wraps. Their source appears to be gossip from a UK retailer. Would that generally considered to be a reliable source for facts about forthcoming Apple products ?
“Apple had a strangely quiet 30th birthday over the weekend”
That´s an understatement. What´s up with Apple?
Real quiet.
“What you really are talking about is wanting some assurance that nothing bad in life will ever happen. It’s just not Apple’s problem if people don’t take care of their personal belongings.
Of course someone will figure out a way to sue them for losing them since no one wants to take responsibility for any of their own behavior.”
Please. He didn’t blame Apple, ask anyone to take responsbility for him, ask for assurances that it won’t happen, or threaten to sue. He was just voicing a concern. The difference between the objects you bring up and bluetooth headphones is that the latter are not kept in a pocket. For all you know, it may be something the prevents him from using such headphones.
There is an enormous chasm between, “boy, those would be easy to lose” to “I want someone to guarantee nothing bad in life will ever happen”.
It’s not going to be Apple that figures out how to make Bluetooth headphones that work with the iPod — it’s going to be the 3rd-party manufacturers like JBL and Bang & Olafsen (and Griffin and Belkin on the lower-end). The buds hurt my ears, so I bought a pair of folding Sensenbrenner black headphones to use with my iPod video; I’ve also got a pair of behind-the-neck white Phillips headphones that I picked up for about $20 at Target that work well with my iPod Shuffle when I work out.
Apple will come out with the basic idea — then the 3rd party developers will run with it and add the whistles and bells.
MW=sure, as in, “I’m sure this is just the start of something great”…