iPod Touch Asserts Its Presence

Apple's iPod Touch, introduced in late 2007 as essentially an iPhone minus the phone part, has quietly grown to prominence as a platform for more than just music playback and is changing the landscape for mobile devices.

While Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has frequently discussed the App Store by mentioning both the iPhone and iPod Touch together, the iPhone has typically stolen the spotlight thanks to the dynamic effect it had on the smartphone market, where it remains one of the industry's hottest sellers. Now it seems that the iPod Touch plays a much greater role for those 100,000 App Store apps than previously believed.

Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics company, said in a blog post that of the 58 million iPhone OS devices sold worldwide through September, the iPod Touch (sometimes called "iTouch") represents 40 percent of the market, with 24 million units sold.

At the most recent iPod event, which featured the public return of Apple's CEO Steve Jobs, the company's chief executive disclosed that Apple has sold 220 million iPods worldwide. So the iTouch's 24 million units is only about one-tenth of the total sold. Then again, iPod has been on the market since 2001 and the iTouch is a relative newcomer.

In that time, though, Flurry has noted how deeply it has dug into people's lives, particularly young users.

"Apple is using the iPod Touch to build loyalty with pre-teens and teens, even before they have their own phones (think: McDonald's Happy Meal marketing strategy,)" Peter Farago, vice president of marketing for Flurry, said in the blog post. "When today's young iPod Touch users age by five years, they will already have iTunes accounts, saved personal contacts to their iPod Touch devices, purchased hundreds of apps and songs, and mastered the iPhone OS user interface. This translates into loyalty and switching costs, allowing Apple to seamlessly 'graduate' young users from the iPod Touch to the iPhone."

"For OEMs hoping to challenge Apple, we believe an even greater sense of urgency must be adopted," he added.

Anecdotally, Farago said he's noticed a shift in usage habits by his friends' children.

"What I was seeing with friends who have kids between 7 and 12 is all the boys had a Nintendo DS for years. Now I'm noticing it seemed like they don't have Nintendo any more, they have an iPod Touch. Their parents are like, 'Please, 99 cent games or a $30 cartridge? I don't have to go to the store and I can control how much they spend?' ... It's a no-brainer," he told InternetNews.com.

All that invested content and data on the Apple device gets them early and locks them in, he added.

"Just that alone makes the iPhone/iTouch very sticky," Farago said. "All the content you can own and can use again with a new device is also appealing."

It's a great reinvention for the iPod, a which began as a simple music playback device. Some pundits predicted Apple would kill off the iPod Classic, which is the only unit left that uses a hard drive instead of Flash memory, but so far it hangs in there.

More than that, though, the iPhone and iTouch may be greasing the skids for Apple's long-rumored iTablet, iPad, or whatever the tablet device might be called.

The general consensus among the rumormongers is that it's a 10- to 12-inch pad that operates like an iTouch, with some form of wireless support. But unlike the iPod Touch and iPhone, Apple tablet apps could run in windows, and it might support multiple apps simultaneously -- if the rumors are to be believed.

At the very least, Farago said, the iPhone and iPod Touch remain valuable stepping stones to even more advanced Apple products.

"If you think about just the user interface learning Apple has gotten out of iTouch and the iPhone, a lot of that is very transferable," Farago said. "For Apple, it's been extremely valuable to see how users to interact with this thing and they are also training users on [the use of] touch."



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The Best iPhone and iPod Touch Games of 2009

We reveal the best iPhone games of 2009 and 2010, plus the top free and commercial iPod touch game apps.

As some of the fastest-growing portable gaming platforms today, it’s no wonder that over a quarter of the 85,000 apps (applications) available to Apple iPhone 3G/3G S and iPod Touch owners are digital diversions. In fact, given these devices’ user-friendly, motion-sensing interfaces; sharp 3D graphics; selection of titles for all ages and interests at a variety of comfortable prices; and ability to retrieve content on-demand virtually anytime, anywhere, well… Let’s just say we’re confident that of the over two billion downloads users have presently notched up in the App Store, more than a few have been purchased with productivity the furthest thing from buyer’s minds. Looking for the perfect way to kill time while waiting for the bus or standing in line to score tickets to a sporting event? See below for our very own game industry analysts’ and experts’ top picks in several of the most popular categories:

Categories

• Action/Arcade

• Music and Puzzle

• Racing and Sports

• Strategy and Simulation

• Adventure and Role-Playing

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26



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How to take a Screenshot on an iPhone or iPod Touch

Learn how to take a screenshot on an iPhone or iPod Touch with just a few simple steps. Screenshots from the iPhone and iPod Touch can be emailed, giving you the ability to capture anything on your device and quickly show it off to friends.

Taking a screenshot with an iPhone or iPod Touch running firmware 3.0 is a very easy process. Follow the simple steps below and you can email your friends screenshots showing proof of your highest gaming scores or hilarious text messages in no time.

Locate the buttons. You need to locate the home and sleep buttons on your device. The home button is located at the bottom of the screen for both the iPhone and iPod Touch. The sleep button is on the top right for the iPhone and top left for the iPod Touch.

Take a screenshot. Press the home and sleep buttons at the same time. Your screen will flash white and you’ll hear a camera shutter sound.

Locate your screenshots. To locate the screenshots go to photos and look in camera roll. The screenshots will be located at the bottom because they are your latest images.

Download or email the image. You can either sync your device with iTunes to download the screenshots to your computer or email them to yourself or friends.

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Five misconceptions about iTunes and iPods

There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about the iTunes/iPod/iPhone ecosystem. Here’s a truthful look at a few of the more popular notions out there. Are there others that you hear people talking about? Share them in the comments.

1. The iTunes Store uses digital rights management (DRM) technology to restrict the use of music that I buy.

When Apple launched the then-named iTunes Music Store in April 2003, it employed Apple’s FairPlay DRM that determined how many Macs (there was no Windows support at launch) you could play purchased AAC audio files on, and restricted usage to iTunes and iPods. Four years later, Apple began offering the option to purchase some songs and albums without DRM in a format called iTunes Plus. Then in April 2009 Apple finally moved to a completely DRM-free catalog.

So, if you purchased any iTunes Plus tracks between 2007 and early 2009, or any tracks after the DRM-free transition, your music has no restrictions on usage. If you own any FairPlay-encumbered music, however, the DRM remains. You can, however, upgrade your music to DRM-free by clicking the iTunes Plus link on the iTunes Store. From there you can choose to upgrade individual albums, individually purchased tracks, or your entire library. Besides removing the DRM, the updated tracks also double the bit rate from 128 Kbps to 256 Kbps.

Remember, though, that your Apple ID is still embedded in every track you buy.

2. AAC is a proprietary Apple format, and only works in iTunes or on an iPod or iPhone.

AAC, or Advanced Audio Coding, is a compression standard developed by the MPEG group and considered to be the replacement for MP3. Apple uses it for all music sold on the iTunes Store, but it works on a lot more hardware and software than just Apple’s iTunes/iPod/iPhone combo.

Microsoft’s Zune and Sony’s Walkman players support AAC, for example, as do many Sony Ericsson phones, the Sony PlayStation and PSP, streaming audio systems such as Sonos and Squeezebox products, and many software players.

3. I can’t burn an audio CD from iTunes tracks.

From the very beginning, Apple has allowed you to create standard audio CDs from your purchased iTunes tracks that would play in any CD player. The only restriction was the number of times you could burn an individual playlist. But you could get around that limitation by simply creating a new playlist. DRM-free files have no such restrictions placed on them.

4. I can’t get my DVDs into iTunes or play them on an iPod.

Because of the copy protection on commercial DVDs (and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), you can’t stick a DVD into your Mac, launch iTunes, and press a button to convert it to an iPod- and iPhone-friendly format. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

Using a free tool such as HandBrake, you can circumvent the copy protection of most DVDs and convert them to iTunes/Apple TV/iPod/iPhone-friendly formats. If HandBrake can’t handle it—which happens with some newer DVDs—you can use the $20 RipIt to first create an unprotected version of the DVD on your hard drive and then transcode it using HandBrake.

5. I can’t connect my iPod/iPhone to my TV to play videos.

Although there’s nothing in the iPod or iPhone box that lets you do so, Apple offers a few options for connecting your portable device to your TV for playback.

The Apple Component AV Cable and Apple Composite AV Cable ($49 each) plug into the Dock connector on your iPod, iPhone, or universal dock and provide connections on the other end to plug into your TV. As an added bonus, earch package also includes a USB power adapter in the box, normally a $29 purchase.

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The iPod touch generation

Is Apple's iPhone-without-a-phone the McDonald's Happy Meal of mobile communications?

Click to enlarge. Source: Flurry Analytics

Peter Farago of the mobile analytics firm Flurry uses data from its November report to make the case that Apple (AAPL) is quietly — and successfully — using the iPod touch to lock in a loyal base of under-age users who will eventually become the next generation of iPhone buyers.

"While it is clear that the iPhone has significant short-term revenue value for Apple," he writes in a report issued Sunday, "Flurry believes that the iPod Touch holds more long-term strategic value for Steve Jobs and team."

"In terms of Life Stage Marketing," Farago writes, "the practice of appealing to different age-based segments, Apple is using the iPod Touch to build loyalty with pre-teens and teens, even before they have their own phones (think: McDonalds' Happy Meal marketing strategy). When today's young iPod Touch users age by five years, they will already have iTunes accounts, saved personal contacts to their iPod Touch devices, purchased hundreds of apps and songs, and mastered the iPhone OS user interface." (link)

The evidence that Apple's strategy is working, Farago says, can be seen in a graph of end-user sessions recorded over the past six months.

Flurry, according to Farago, tracks 15 million end-user sessions every day from its "analytics solution" code embedded in 3,000 applications on 4 platforms: Apple's iPhone OS ( both iPhone and iPod Touch), Research in Motion's (RIMM) Blackberry, JavaME and Google (GOOG) Android.

The graph above shows that the iPod touch's share of those user sessions has grown 4 points over the past six months — the same as Android despite starting from a much larger user base. While the iPhone continues to grow in user sessions, its share in Flurry's data has dropped from 57% to 50%.

Even more significant, according to Farago, is that kind of things the kids are doing with their iPod touches.

"Anecdotally," he writes, "we know the 'iPod Touch Generation' is made up of heavy MySpace, Facebook and SMS users, who voraciously share their lives with, and influence their ever-expanding social graph. Importantly, this also includes promoting products they like. Empirically, Flurry compared how iPod Touch session usage has changed over the last six months across key application categories important to this demographic; namely, Social Networking and Games."

Farago's empirical evidence is displayed in the two charts below, which show the iPod Touch growing faster than both the iPhone and the Android devices in Flurry's Social Networking and Games categories.

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iPod Touch Is Apple’s Stealth Weapon for Mobile Growth

Steve Jobs once referred to the iPod Touch as “training wheels for the iPhone,” but it’s no novelty to Apple. An analytics firm estimates Apple has shipped about 24 million units of the iPod Touch, which represents about 40 percent of the devices running the iPhone operating system.

Mobile analytics firm Flurry claims it made the estimate based on a sample of 3,000 applications, 45 million consumers and four platforms. Apple provided a figure of 58 million devices running the iPhone OS, and of that total, Flurry believes 24 million are iPod Touch devices.

Flurry speculates that Apple’s iPod Touch is crucial for the company to retain and expand its market share in the mobile OS space.

“While it is clear that the iPhone has significant short-term revenue value for Apple, Flurry believes that the iPod Touch holds more long-term strategic value for Steve Jobs and team,” Flurry wrote in a blog post. “As all industry eyes look to the iPhone, the iPod Touch is quietly building a loyal base among the next generation of iPhone users, positioning Apple to corner the smartphone market not only today, but also tomorrow.”

That’s a believable number, because the iPod Touch caters to a broad market segment including gamers, teenagers (who presumably can’t afford the iPhone’s ~$100 monthly bill), Verizon customers avoiding AT&T and more.

The numbers also signify healthy growth for Apple’s iPhone platform. In September, Apple claimed it had shipped 40 million units of the iPhone and iPod Touch worldwide. In just three months, that number has increased 18 million — about 30 percent.



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The iPod turns eight years old

Do you remember where you were on October 23, 2001? I don’t, but I do remember that Apple make a very big announcement, which—at the time—I thought was a big mistake: the iPod. Today marks the eighth year of the iPod’s existence and these days I find it hard to image a time when the iPod wasn’t a part of the cultural zeitgeist.

The first iPod had 10 hours of battery life, a FireWire port (which I still miss), and 5GB of storage for $399. Oh, and it was Mac-compatible only. When I first heard about it I thought, “Who the heck even has one gig of music? Dumb move, Apple.” Good thing Apple doesn’t call me up for business pointers because I couldn’t have been more wrong about the iPod if I had tried.

Over the years, the iPod has morphed into far more than an MP3 player but today, on its eighth birthday, let us take a moment to remember fondly that simpler time, when seeing someone with white headphones was a rarity and there was a sort of unspoken bond between iPod users. Here's the news story that ran on Macworld about the announcement, and you can watch the Apple music event in which Steve unleashes the iPod an an unsuspecting world.

Here’s to another eight years of the iPod. (I’m sure that I’ll be amongst the first to line up for the iPod cranial implant that Apple will introduce in 2016.)

For more iPod nostalgia, check out our iPod 5th anniversary podcast, Jason Snell's recollections of that day, a timeline of the first five years of iPod, and a selection of iPod quotes from back in 2001. You can also read Jonathan Seff's first look at the original iPod.



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