Low-quality and portable? That must beat actually being good, right?
If you've encountered a Sony PSP, you've seen how a handheld video player should look. It's luscious; it's big; the screen demands to be looked at. As it happens, I first saw one in May, when the Elgato team demonstrated how they'd figured out how to transfer video from EyeTV to the PSP; they showed me an episode of Desperate Housewives. It looked great.
Compared to that, the new video-enabled iPod is just not there. Sure, Jobs said when introducing it that "The screen is so large..." but that's 'large' when compared to something smaller. The new screen is barely larger than the old iPod: 320x240 pixels vs 220x176, 2.5-inch TFT. What's new is the video-decoding chips, from Portal Player, which makes the guts of the machine, giving 30 frame-per-second real-time decoding of MPEG-4 and H.264 video.
Having said a year ago, with the launch of the iPod Photo, that there wasn't any point doing video on a handheld - that it was "the wrong direction to go", "there?s no content," "the screens are too small" and that competitors to the iPod putting R&D into providing video were "digging in the wrong place" - what does Jobs go and do? Yup, unveil an iPod that can play video.
All Apple's rivals are going to say that they were there first, and they do it better. Only Sony, though, can legitimately claim to have the better experience. With the PSP selling at a rate that does challenge the iPod, it will be interesting to see how content sales play out in the next year or so.
