Filed under: Accessories, Odds and ends
Pantech phone with scroll wheel
The iPhone. Will they or won't they? That has been a constant topic of discussion amongst the Mac faithful for a long time. Along comes Pantech, a South Korean phone maker, who has introduced the phone to the right. What's that thing that looks like the iPod's click wheel? Why, it is Pantech's 'revolutionary touch-wheel sensor' which is not only used for the phones built in music player, but also for the phone's camera.The PG-3600V is on the market in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
andy said 6:07PM on 5-15-2006
i use an ipod but boy am i getting fed up with hearing about them and imitations - its a bloody portable music player, its not that exciting - just convienient. apple sites - get back to the MAC! thats where its at! - if the ipod devision was spun off, would you still cover it?
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ho ho ho said 6:38PM on 5-15-2006
shut up andy.
apple is about macs, the os, ilife, servers, pro video apps, ipods, basically lots and lots of things.
get a grip. apple as a company are on form and doing great with a myriad of projects and products. not one of them is to the detriment of the other so get a bloody grip.
back on topic: dont apple hold patent on the scroll wheel?...
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andy said 7:04PM on 5-15-2006
ooooOOO get you hohoho, i wont have an opinion in future, i mean, the comments option is purely to agree and brown nose apple.
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Andrew (not Andy) Montgomery said 8:50PM on 5-15-2006
I gave it the ol' Google try, but I cannot find the article I read about the scroll-wheel on the iPod. The only interesting article I could find was on News.com, entitled "Perspective: The secret of iPod's scroll wheel". Here's what Eliot Van Buskirk had to say in September of 2004:
"Synaptics wasn't offering its technology to any other MP3 player companies until recently, and it still doesn't offer the round version found on the iPod to anyone but Apple."
Anyone else find anything more? This scroll-wheel technology is the kind of thing that Apple may have licensed with an exclusive contract for a number of years. Perhaps that contact expired. I think I remember the contract being for something like 3 years. But I can't find the article. How decidedly inconvenient.
And Andy, have an opinion. Voice it. Even post it. But I wouldn't expect web sites dedicated to Apple to stop talking about iPods. Last quarter, Apple's music division accounted for about 25% of it's revenues. Apple has seen it's iPod sales grow every single quarter for nearly 3 years straight. Within the next three to five years, sales of iPods and music downloads could easily double the size of Apple, according to a study recently published by Generator, an industry research and consulting company focussed on digital music. Apple's influence with the iPod is absolutely astonishing. It is defining digital content distribution. Apple single-handedly force all five major record labels to re-sign their contracts with Apple in the U.S., guaranteeing that songs remain USD$0.99 each for the foreseeable future. These are the same record labels that charged $18 for a $5 CD for the better part of a decade... because no one could stop them.
If this isn't exciting to you, that's cool. But what this "bloody portable music player" is doing is nothing short of historic. Sorry if that bores you.
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shirster said 10:07PM on 5-15-2006
@_@ Is that legal????
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