Apple iPod touch: Where’s My Mail?
At first, Apple’s (AAPL) new iPod touch seemed like the perfect solution to the iPhone/AT&T (T) dilemma. The day after Steve Jobs unveiled it (for shipment later this month) the rush of pre-orders pushed it to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list, where it was briefly the No. 1 selling electronics item.
A lot of people, it seems, like the idea of a pocket-size multi-touch Wi-Fi-enabled Web browser and music/video-player that doesn’t come with all that iPhone baggage — in particular, AT&T’s wireless network and two-year contract. With the touch, you could keep your current cellphone — and whatever wireless network works best for you — and use the new device for your entertainment, your news, your mail…
Uh oh. Your mail. There’s the rub. A mail client is not one of the applications Apple chose to put on the iPod touch.
Why not? There’s no technical barrier. There’s a very nice mail app on the iPhone that could be easily ported over to the new guy. After all, the two share the same user interface and operating system, and there’s plenty of room for it in the touch’s 8 and 16 GB Flash memories.
And there’s no question it would be popular. In a survey on 9to5Mac, right, mail was the No. 1 application readers wanted to see added to the device, ahead of iChat and Google Maps.
We put the question to Apple, and got this response from spokesperson Natalie Kerris:
“no juicy explanation, we just feel it’s the right feature set for that product.”
Which is to say the obvious: there is no mail program on the touch because Apple doesn’t want the device to cannibalize sales of the iPhone. They want to keep the iPhone, a communications product, separate in the consumer’s mind from the iPod touch, a music and entertainment device.
You might think this creates a perfect opportunity for outside developers to write a mail client, but that’s tricky. It’s hard enough to write applications for the iPhone and the touch without a proper software developers kit. But programmers also run the risk that Apple could at any time release their own mail client — either as a free software update or as a pay-for-download stand-alone application — putting the programmers out of business overnight.
That’s the kind of game Microsoft used to play in the PC software application market. And that’s the kind of trouble a company gets into when it manipulates feature sets to suit its needs rather than its customers’.
Written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Read more great feeds at is source WEBSITE
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