Art N' About

Author: JOYCE MAN

By now, any news is old news if it contains the words "iPod" and "smaller version," but everyone from tech geeks to design pros to adolescent girls with rich daddies have not ceased to lavish attention on Apple's mp3 family members of ever-diminishing size and ever-ballooning specs. The lines have gotten sleeker, the displays more candy-store delectable. Steve Jobs and the so-called Apple "geniuses" have refined and continuously revolutionized digital music products, and up 'til now, it's been to overwhelming success. But one wonders, as the company compulsively releases new gadgets that get tinier and tinier, has the revolution been over-revolutionized?

There's a big reason and a small reason for this question. The small issue is precisely that - Apple has based a large part of their portable digital music design wave on size. Decreasing size. Yes, for electronics, this has always been the trend and the challenge - how to maximize the efficiency of even the smallest crevices and vacuum-pack controls, interface screen and memory into the cutest little space. Thank God we no longer have room-sized computers or bottle-scale cell phones. But how low can you go before biggying up the small makes your product disappear altogether? The new iPod Nano is as thin as your pencil. Its marketing tagline even acknowledges and mocks the problem it presents, "1,000 songs. Impossibly small." But ultimately, we're not sure how a consumer is going to get his fingers, much less his head, around a paper-thin mp3-player.

The big issue is also precisely that. Ten years ago, the number of songs a consumer could access at any one moment was confined to the storage capacity of any audio CD. Today, however, with the newest iPod, you can take your favorite 15,000 songs anywhere - if you even have that many. But is it so great to be able to take 25,000 photos with you out to lunch, or is that idea, well, out to lunch?

As digital music technology becomes more widespread and the competition develops it, memory quantity will cease to be the control factor of who gets the customer. If, for example, Creative Jukebox, the alternative manufacturer favored by the techies, also reaches the 25,000-song, 60-gigabyte mark, then they can also start tapping the music-hungry market. In other words, if Apple's biggest news continues to be size, then we have news of our own. Size won't really matter anymore - the competition will.

What has kept the iPod wheel turning is really their latch on the concept of mp3-player as luxury fashion item. Even more than the mobile phone or the digital camera, music players have become "The Accessory." The clean, white finish of Apple's iPod originals and the blue-green-pink-silver of the iPod-minis are really what have attracted the masses. The next step would be to take tech to high fashion. Imagine this - logo-emblazoned iPod Gucci, Tiffany diamond-studded iPod, stainless steel iPod in the shape of a sphere.

Several companies are already capitalizing on that idea. Sony Ericsson has combined superior technology with the their cellular phones in the Sony Walkman Phone, while Korean company MobiBlu has released their diminutive mp3 cubes in pinks and blues that are shorter than an AA battery. They have also recently released a Louis Vuitton cellular phone case in collaboration with the fashion powerhouse. The only thing coming between them and the iPod following is price and, you guessed it, memory size.