Bluetooth on ipod (no, not for syncing)
Yes, I know I'm bringing this up again. But here's how I think it should work.
Picture Rendezvous sharing on iTunes. It lets people near you (on a network) listen to your songs.
Picture Bluetooth sharing on an iPod. People near you physically will be able to listen to (but not copy) your songs. Same limits as iTunes sharing - only people near you, and only streaming.
Done right, other people's libraries would just appear in your playlists. Maybe with a little icon to show that they're shared. There could be an option to do a little bleep when someone comes into range, so you know to check for playlists. (For a nice Apple touch, it could wait until your current track was over, then do the bleep in the gap between songs.)
Of course, such sharing would be optional, and you could customise which playlists to share, just like itunes.
Amorya
Picture Rendezvous sharing on iTunes. It lets people near you (on a network) listen to your songs.
Picture Bluetooth sharing on an iPod. People near you physically will be able to listen to (but not copy) your songs. Same limits as iTunes sharing - only people near you, and only streaming.
Done right, other people's libraries would just appear in your playlists. Maybe with a little icon to show that they're shared. There could be an option to do a little bleep when someone comes into range, so you know to check for playlists. (For a nice Apple touch, it could wait until your current track was over, then do the bleep in the gap between songs.)
Of course, such sharing would be optional, and you could customise which playlists to share, just like itunes.
Amorya
Comments
Some kind wonderful modly being or other, please move this thread to its rightful home!
Amorya
Also, wouldn't it suck the shit out of your battery faster than you can say "bad analogy?"
Better than wirelessly sharing libraries would be bluetooth earbuds. If only tech could get that small for cheap.
see, the good thing about the name iPod, is that it does not limit itself to music...
The Bluetooth wireless communications scheme has a theoretical maximum data transfer of 723 kbps. But, users will inevitably push products up to and beyond their limits for range and noise immunity, which means that performance will suffer if you don't make the right design decisions. (...) At a bit error rate (BER) of 0.04%, for example, DH5 packets have only a 33% chance of being received without error. In other words, it will take an average of three attempts to send a packet ? reducing potential maximum bandwidth from 723 kbits/sec to just 241 kbits/sec. On the other hand, DM5 packets show virtually no degradation from their maximum bandwidth of 477 kbits/sec until 10 times that BER.
emphasis mine
from http://www.csr.com/enews/sw007.html