Jeff Jarvis: The iPod (Touch/iPhone) moment has arrived

I hope Jeff won’t mind me quoting two paragraphs here. I found his perspective refreshing and exciting. It’s from his weekly Guardian column. He argues that Apple made a mistake in the way it introduced the iPhone — it should have introduced the iPod Touch first, followed by the iPhone.

I’m having quite a time reconciling myself to standard handsets after almost a month’s continuous use of the iPhone. I reckon I’m almost ready to knock-up a 30-days-with-the-iPhone post. Meantime, have check out Jeff’s viewpoint.

Link: BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » The iPod moment is here — on the iPod

In these pages, internet parent Vint Cerf wondered when television would reach its iPod moment – that is, the time when we download video more than we sit watching broadcasts. Then TV will face the upheaval music has barely survived. Also here, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has speculated about newspapers’ iPod moment, which he foresees arriving with the emergence of ‘a relatively mass-market device on which reading a newspaper (and watching it and listening to it) will seem quite normal”. Or as Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams blogged: ‘When you have a web browser in your pocket, a printed newspaper is redundant.”

Well, I think the iPod moment is here. It arrived with the latest iPod and its off shoot, the iPhone. The momentousness of this event was lost, I think, because Apple made a mistake in its release of the latest iPods in the US. Apple first released the iPhone and then announced the almost identical but phoneless iPod Touch. The problem was that we came to see this new device first and foremost as a phone with a few added features. But if Apple had released the iPod Touch first – as it has done in the UK – we would have seen that this gadget is really a whole computer with wi-fi connectivity, a web browser that has the ability to download and display – and also capture and share – all media: text (I just met an author who’s releasing his novel on the iPod), photos, audio, video, interactivity. The iPhone is then merely the same computer with a telephone added.