Comment: Have MP3 players come of age?

iPod celebrates sixth birthday

28 October 2007 20:02 GMT / By Stuart Miles

They say a week is a long time in politics, and they would be right, but a week in the world of technology and gadgets can be even longer.

Take an even greater measurement of time and Apple's iPod, something which defines music on the go, is now 6 years old. Yep that's right, just 6 years old.

However, in that time while Labour's been in power and George Bush has been in the White House, we've gone from MP3 players that could store just one album produced by companies that don't even exist anymore to something that can not only play music, but video, view images, play games and even surf the web, and hold up to 40,000 music tracks for you to listen on the go.

So what are we likely to see in the next 6 years - more of the same? More uneducated magazines gracing the iPod with numerous awards?

I very much doubt it. When the iPod launched it was in a world where we still believed in the CD, Napster hadn't been created and iTunes wasn't even launched.

Now however, Apple has also realised this, music is finally moving toward phones at a faster pace than ever.

Sony Ericsson's "Walkman" brand is now synonymous with phones - not just standalone MP3 players - and other manufacturers like Nokia and Samsung are both hot on their heels.

Apple of course has the iPhone, meaning that perhaps it's the beginning of the end for the humble MP3 player and therefore, the iPod.

But what a ride, we've gone from carrying around cassette tapes, then CDs, then for the early adopter types MiniDiscs, before settling on a format that was simple and easy to share.

Then DRM came in, Apple shut down iTunes to make it a closed system and we've been struggling ever since. At least Apple has started, even if only because forced by market pressure, to sell DRM-free EMI tracks at the same price as copy-protected tunes.

So where do I see myself in the next 6 years? Hopefully with an MP3 player in my phone using and sharing music with friends how it was always meant to be, before the marketeers and the money men got involved.