The Small Wave.

According to the Financial Times this is in the works.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of this model, though assuming it’s optional it finally has a shot to succeed now that the largest and most popular online music store (and second-largest music store) would be offering it for those who want it.

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So a Brazilian ice cream maker has started a promotion where some of its Popsicles will instead contain a free iPod Shuffle.

Cool idea (pun intended). However, in looking at the pictures of what a winner looks like, I predict the next time we hear about this will be because stores have a lot of poked, prodded, and broken Popsicle packages as users try to determine if they’ve got a winner.

Do the new 2G Zunes have what it takes to compete with the latest iPods?

Well, in an article titled “7 Ways Zune Beats iPod?” Team Zune Luv certainly thinks so. In fact, the “team” claims the Zune is

“…better for the consumer in a number of way [sic] that, at this point, the iPod simply can’t touch”

I disagree, so let’s take a look at their list and see what we can make of it:

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So Universal has teamed up with SpiralFrog on a subscription service with a twist; the service is now out of beta and officially launched. SpiralFrog is unique among subscription services in that it’s subscription-less (at least for now). No monthly fee is required, the site is intended to be funded solely by advertising and your recurring visits:

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I sifted through the rumors yesterday and come up looking pretty good today now that we know what was actually announced. I’ll talk about all the iPod models here, but what I really like is how they handled their high-end models. We’ll get to that in a minute.

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All this speculation and whatnot about the new iPods tomorrow. I’m on record about the 6G iPod here and here. As for the nano, the rumors I’ve seen (wider body, larger screen, video-capable, more capacity) don’t sound too crazy so they wouldn’t surprise me. I also think the Shuffle will gain an extra GB of memory for the same price.

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Occasionally I go against my own advice and click on a link whose title ends in a question mark. Trust me, you should never do that.

In this case it was a GigaOM article entitled “iPhone’s sanity check, iPods missing a beat?“

Since Apple just released their 3Q numbers, and we know they sold 9.81M iPods last quarter, the only sanity we should check is that of anyone asking if iPods are missing a beat.

The article states:

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Well, Apple’s press release for 3Q results is out, and it mentions no specific iPhone sales numbers:

““We’re thrilled to report the highest June quarter revenue and profit in Apple’s history, along with the highest quarterly Mac sales ever,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iPhone is off to a great start—we hope to sell our one-millionth iPhone by the end of its first full quarter of sales—and our new product pipeline is very strong.””

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Many sites have published links to a video with the alleged new interface for the 6G video iPod (here is MacDailyNews’). The video doesn’t necessarily remind one of the iPhone, though clearly elements have been borrowed.

I’ve gone on record stating the 6G iPod would have the iPod interface from the iPhone, or something very close (for example, the iPod might add a virtual scroll wheel for games).

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There are several stories surfacing (for example, here and here) about how to kill the AT&T service and just use the WiFi functionality of the iPhone along with the coolest iPod Apple’s ever made.

This is an interesting intellectual exercise, and its kind of fun to see what can be done and what you can get away with. Deep down perhaps all of us like to see how we can “cheat the system,” as it were.

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