I've been thinking about the interesting mix of functionality credits and deficits of the iPod, and I knew there was something off regarding the use models people follow and this device meant to facilitate them. I think I just figured out what the problem is:

The iPod lets you store 1,000 songs. That's 4,000 minutes, 66 hours, or 2.7 solid days of uninterrupted, unrepeated music. The battery lasts for 10 hours. As sold, the iPod can only be recharged by connecting the firewire cable to your computer, and incidentally, your music collection. An AC adapter, presumably for travel yet unusable on an airplane, costs $50 and takes up approximately as much space as the iPod itself. (Can you say 'road trip'? The iPod can't, but that's beside the point.) [My bad. the iPod does come with an AC adapter. Extra adapters are $50. -KF]

So, in the ordinary use case, a person synchronizes all 4.6 gigs of their music to the iPod, but can only listen to around 10% of it before having to plug the device back in to the computer to recharge, at the same time giving it access to the computer's master music collection again.

Essentially there are only three rationale for the extra 90% of the storage space. First, if you want to listen to specific songs or albums in the ten hours, but you don't know what they are when you're at the computer. Second, if you're using the iPod as a portable storage device in order to copy data to other computers, and the ability to play the extra music files is superfluous. Third, you use the adapter 9 times for every one time you plug your iPod into your Mac.

While it's an attractive idea to have all of your songs in your pocket/hand/bag/jacket, for that moment when you have the inspiration to listen to that one specific song, I have to speak up as a member of the crowd that's big on genre playlists and random shuffle within them.

To me (and your mileage may vary) the more valuable iPod would be the one with 512 megs in RAM, not flash rom, but good ol' lose power and lose the data RAM. This, incidentally, would cost about $20 from the OEM as opposed to several hundred for the flash memory. (This is not the problem that it might seem, because you're talking about a device with a high-capacity fixed battery carrying redundant data. If the battery goes flat and dumps the songs, it doesn't matter because charging the battery by firewire-ing to your Mac takes an hour, while restoring all the songs will take only a fraction of that time over the same connection, and it'll happen simultaneously.)

512 megs would be enough RAM for over 8 hours of music (15 times more than my Rio). At the end of the day, when you plug your iPod into your Mac's firewire port, the computer can take a look at the music you listened to since the last sync, chuck those songs from the iPod, and randomly select more titles from the computer's iTunes library (toss 8 electronica songs, load up 8 fresh tracks, etc.).

Of course, if there's a song you listened to during the day that you'd like to keep on the player, you can always mark it with a button, to 'save until I delete' and it'll stick around. Further, you could, via the iTunes interface, choose specific songs or albums to be saved temporarily or indefinitely on the iPod. Basically, songs would be ephemeral unless specifically marked as eternal.

Think Different: Think TiVo. You get new stuff, you view (listen to) it. The next time: you have new stuff.

What's the advantage? Size and price. Truth be told, without having to power a winchester drive, you'll also get a lot more than 10 hours out of the thing, likely twice as much (with 100% skip protection). So make it a gig of RAM, or a device that can 'sleep' for a week without fear of losing the songs. I love the idea of a device half the size of the already petite iPod, with a little white breathing 'sleep' LED for good measure. Of course, without the 5 gig, 1.8" state of the art profit-margin drive, the price for the device could drop to $225. Heck, call it $299 for the early adopters, and drop it down after Christmas. Call it an Expo Special.

I don't like thinking about music half as much as I like listening to it, and it's my bet that you don't either. Have you ever had the experience of deciding what to watch, looking through your tapes and/or DVDs, shrugging, turning on the TV, finding something on TV that you own, but deciding to watch it on TV, even though you passed over it in your own library? There is an appeal to non-premeditated media. It's why random shuffle exists. It's why having a random tenth of my music collection in my hand is just as good as all of it. Better if it means twice the battery life, half the weight, and a third off the cost.

Heck, though I dislike digital rights protections as much as the next hacker, I'd be happy with a netflicks model: You get an iPod-full of music, downloaded straight to the device in a format you can't offload, and every time you're done with some music, it gets tossed and new music comes in, and all you pay is a monthly fee for the service, no matter how much music you get. Think of it as subsidized, commercial-free radio, only you can skip, repeat, and tailor your station to the precise genres and/or artists you like.

Lastly, to think really different, firewire should be rethought. Yes, an album transferred in 10 seconds is gee-whiz wow, especially when compared to the nearly two minutes it would take to transfer over USB, but isn't Apple trying to show us a world without wires? What could be cooler than an airport-equipped iPod? (Don't answer that. It's rhetorical.) With an 802.11b Airport card in the iPod, it could sync an album in 45 seconds, and all it would have to do is come within 100 yards of your mac. Most of the time you wouldn't even know it's doing it. Just bring the device home, and while you're watching TV, doing homework, sleeping, whatever, it's refreshing your music, even if it never leaves the pocket of your jacket on the coat rack. To fully swap a gig of music would take 15 minutes.

Okay, so that would suck power, so you'd need a charging stand, at which point it's just as easy to plug it in to the computer, so maybe Airport has to be better thought out for this particular device, but the rest still stands. Time to completely swap a fresh gig of music via Firewire? 2.5 minutes in the background.

Even this new Fury-iPod would not be a 'groundbreaking device,' but it would be a little more innovative, ditching the metaphor of an MP3 player as a storage device plus playback, and giving it a more organic existence; indeterminate, but welcomed. I don't expect everyone to feel the same passion about what I'm saying, but I bet those with TiVos are nodding their heads...

This piece is still rough. I'd love to read your comments, and continue a dialog. What do you think?