RUMOR: iPod + Camera
posted Saturday Jul 11, 2009 by Scott Ertz
It's a lot of fun to watch the buying habits of large companies and speculate what they are doing with the products. In today's installment, Apple has purchased cameras. Lot of them. A lot more then they need to fulfill the manufacturing needs of the iPhone. What could this mean? Spying on competitors like in Antitrust? Probably not. More likely is the inclusion of a camera in the next generation of the iPods.
While it is not financially feasible to add a camera to the Nano, it is very likely we will see a camera added to the iPod Touch. In fact, we here at The Upstream are pretty shocked that it has taken them this long to do it. The Touch runs the same OS as the iPhone, which has a camera (granted they just started actually letting you use it for something), so it isn't a matter of technology standing in their way. They just never did.
Now, this is a very exciting prospect, unless you work for a company that makes crappy digital cameras, especially crappy digital VIDEO cameras, like the Flip. The Flip series has been out for a few years and has always baffled me in its popularity. The image quality has always been rather crappy, and it has the cord built-in, which seems like a convenience until you inevitably break the end of the USB off. Now, with a $229 iPod Touch including a video camera with the ability to edit and upload the video right from the device, hopefully this will be the end of that product line's popularity.
What do you think? iPod Touch with a camera - cool or useless?