Off Topic: Make me a WiPod!

I try to avoid getting my geek on here, but I couldn't resist. I, like a bazillion others out there, have been ogling the new iPhone while being completely uninterested in buying one. I currently have a work-provided Blackberry, and have no reason to expect to use anything but that in the near or long term future. Therefore, the phone part would be of no value to me. Plus, I don't have six hundred bucks burning a hole in my pocket. I already have plenty of holes in my pockets, and I need that money to buy new pants.

However, I’ve been saying that by the end of the year Steve Jobs needs to hop back up on the stage and introduce the next generation of iPods, which would (should) essentially be the iPhone without the “phone” part. Multi-touch screen, OSX, Wi-Fi access, and bigger drives. It seems I’m not the only one thinking this way.

Now, in this article, the writer suggests that the next iPod will not have internet access. To me that would be a mistake. I would think that the benefits of having a truly wi-fi networked iPod would be huge to Apple and to users. And it’s exactly what I want. I want my iPod to do the following:

-Automatically connect to available wifi
-sync wirelessly. I hate cables. So does Steve Jobs.
-Be recognized by my desktop machine running iTunes, so that I can listen to music on my office computer that's shared by my iPod.
-Sync with an AppleTV wirelessly, so I can (in theory) go to a friend's house and play that episode of Lost on my friend's TV easily. I say "in theory" because I have no friends with AppleTV, nor do I expect to any time soon.
-Have all that cool google maps stuff and browser stuff that the iPhone has.
-And, yes, I suppose to some it would be great to be able to buy music from the iTunes Music Store directly from the iPod. I don't expect to do that much, but I can't imagine Apple's not thinking that way.

It seems to me that anything less wouldn't be worth doing. Especially because it ALREADY EXISTS.



Imagine being able to walk into the office with your iPod, it connects to the Wifi automatically,