Video on iPod

I am a recent Palm person (Clie to Tungsten T3 to settling on the T5) and in the past didn’t give much credence to portable video… but over the last month I found the Core Pocket Movie Player and Handbrake (Mac OS video compression software) to be pretty darn cool!

Today, I just watched yesterdays “The Daily Show” while having coffee at the coffee shop. I didn’t have to lug my PowerBook around, and felt much less conspicuous doing so. On my recent airplane flights, I watched several movies (reasonable quality and sized about 300-400MB). The Palm screen provides much more viewing pleasure than the horrible monitors used for inflight movies.

I think video on the iPod will be next year’s killer function. The G5’s are now pretty fast, some able to compress video at almost half real time. And if iTunes offers tv shows at the proper handheld bitrate and resolution: consumers won’t have to take the time to convert video at all, and on demand video would be combined with anywhere video. Full Tivo integration would be even better.

But… the beauty of having video on the Palm is that it is a true multifunction device. It has the potential to do many things really well - much like an ultra-portable PowerBook. I don’t want to replace my iPod, but if a 3rd party Palm software comes out with an iPod-like interface: I am all over it. I only have so many pockets…