“Marimba” shatters the early morning silence. Groggy, you fumble for your iPhone and “slide to unlock”, ending the alarm. A cloudy, gloomy day greets you as you skip the weather and start on your email. In the background, your iPhone begins to stream the morning news. Not all of it and not all from one source, just your favorites. Just what you’d previously setup in iTunes Podcast Creator.
Sports and local highlights — minus the crime news that’s too harsh for your morning mellow — flow one from the next, scraped while you slept from CNN, ABC, BBC, CBC, Comedy, and all the independent, niche podcasts you’d favorite’d. The fuzzy-logic of Apple’s servers matched your criteria as closely as possible while still filling the 60 min. time slot you’d set up. And once collected, assembled it and pushed it out to your iMac, where iTunes made it available immediately for streaming over WiFi right to your iPhone.
Today, however, you’re running late and don’t even have time to sync before heading out the door. But since your iPhone can access your iMac’s streaming, custom-podcasts over the blazingly fast 4G LTE network, you don’t even notice the transition from local to wide area network as your door closes and you hit the street. You just keep on listening as Jon Stewart makes fun of whos-that-president for the umpteenth time. And as you jump on the train, with a couple quick taps, your iMac is updated, your iTunes Podcast Creator is adjusted, Stewart is out of tomorrow’s mix, and iPhone lover Stephen Colbert is back in.
The good-looking passenger beside you comments on the awesome sounding custom podcast you’re rocking. Smiling, you tap another button and peer-to-peer it right on over, just as the train pulls out and the day starts to look ever so much brighter…
Sound more like a multi-media dream than current reality? Well, some of Apple’s newest patents look like they might be trying to make this particular dream come true. Read on for what just might be the future of iTunes and truly mobile media…
In the years before iPhone, my smartphones had replaceable batteries and I usually carried a spare, especially on trips. Inexplicably, the iPhone doesn’t afford this “luxury” — the battery is not user-replaceable and when it’s dead, it’s dead. If you don’t have a charger handy, you are out of luck. This can be particularly frustrating if you are taking a long flight, want to watch a movie on your iPhone’s expansive screen, and still have enough juice left to call someone when you get to your destination.
