wiPod: the next big thing?

 If you man­aged to catch the news today, the twit­ter-sphere was abuzz with it, Apple is freshen­ing its product line in pre­par­a­tion for this upcom­ing hol­i­day sales season.

  As vari­ous pun­dits both at the Apple event and mon­it­or­ing it remotely twittered away, it seemed that Steve Jobs was at his best, once again, in front of a crowd of the con­ver­ted. Gotta love live blog­ging and twitter.

What’s new in the Apple cata­logue for this sea­son?  How about an iPod Nano that includes video.

Or, how about this cool thing: the iPod Touch (or as some are call­ing it, the wiPod): an Apple iPhone without the phone.

It looks inter­est­ing; only the deluxe for me:

• 16gb on board memory 
• 320 x 480 display 
• 802.11 b/g wi-fi 
• A bunch more stuff
• $399.00 USD

For me, the wiPod isn’t that big a deal. I’m able to do most everything it can with my trusty Palm T|X. Sure, Blazer, the default TX browser is dated and needs updat­ing to handle AJAX, stream­ing video, etc. Also, an applic­a­tion that prop­erly syncs to Google Cal­en­dar would be appre­ci­ated. But to dump this and get a wiPod now is not in my cards.

But, should the bat­tery die or the sys­tem brick, you can bet I’d be con­sid­er­ing the iPod Touch as a replacement.

*** UPDATE ***

I recently went through some of the pros/cons of upgrad­ing from a Palm T|X to the Apple iPod Touch:

Down­sides: Battery…replaceable by apple. TX has to be unscrewed to be opened and replaced.
No expan­sion cards…TX can take up to 2 GB. Swap music and files by using more cards.
iTunes: must use it to copy music and video to the unit. 16GB is not enough when you have lots of video and pod­casts.
Price…have to buy one. 

Upsides: It’s an Apple. Styl­ish. Cool. Screen is same size as TX. Plays more video formats. New product at the begin­ning of it’s devel­op­ment life­cycle, TX is near it’s end.
Price…own one.