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By RACHEL KONRAD, Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO - The newest iPod digital music player, debuting in February for $249, will be a half-inch thick and roughly the size of a business card.
The price is about $50 cheaper than Apple's previous least expensive model of digital music's most popular product.
Not resting on its laurels, tomorrow Apple will announce a new product that they said would go even further in miniaturization and style - "Smaller and Sharpler" is the company motto now. Apple is working hard to build on the history of innovative and user-friendly industrial design shown by such products as the original Macintosh computer, its descendant the iMac, and the seemingly ubiquitous cultural MacGuffin, the iPod with the release of the iThing.
The iThing is breathtaking in its elegance. The size of a thick credit card, it features one side of burnished titanium. The other is a fully operational LCD display covering the entire surface of the iThing. Unlike laptop screens and even flat-screen displays for desktop use, the iThing's display runs right to the edge of the object, leaving no frame. It is the image it carries. Design specialists and art-world denizens alike were brimming over with adulation for the look. "The semiotics of removing the frame - they make me shudder like a Mormon tourist who has mistakenly wandered into my club," said Pierre St. Honore, editor of "Style, Damn You, Style" magazine.
Engineers were no less subdued in their praise for the process by which the frame was discarded, but are even more enthusiastic over the back of the iThing. "There are no openings, no seams, no nothing - and yet it's fully functional," swooned Griffin Mifflin of TechnoHyperLinkAdFusion Weekly. Controls work by sensing slight changes in electrical conductivity when fingers or a stylus is moved across the "zone of command," which is laid out so that it can be easily manipulated by a user's index and second fingers while the iThing is being held between the thumb and ring finger. The user thus actually manipulates the controls on the back of the iThing while navigating a menu displayed on the front screen. The iThing has an internal battery that charges by induction when the iThing is in its cradle.
iThing software currently includes an options menu, a built-in clock, and screen savers. "We were going to include PDA-type stuff," said one engineer, "but we ran out of processing power, memory, and battery life, and Steve Jobs insisted we couldn't make it any bigger."
Nonetheless, the iThing is expected to be at least as big a hit as, and a lot more legal than, their last product, the iDoobie.
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