Where Does Your Ipod Touch Money Go?

At first glance, Apple's iPod Touch looks almost exactly like its sibling the iPhone. It sports the same distinctive touch screen, plays movies and music in much the same way, and can also use wireless Internet connections for surfing the Web. All it really lacks is the ability to call another person.

But according to a teardown analysis conducted by market-research firm iSuppli, the Touch isn't just a stripped-down iPhone, but rather it has some unique design traits of its own. ISuppli pegs Apple's total cost of components on the 8GB version of the Touch at $147, or about 49% of the $299 retail price on the device. This would follow the pattern of other devices in Apple's iPod family that generally carry material costs that amount to about half, give or take a few percentage points, of the retail price.

While it has the same core features as the iPhone (except, of course, those that require a phone), the Touch, unveiled on Sept. 5, likely represents the road map that Apple will follow on future iPods, says iSuppli's Andrew Rassweiler. "We expect the click-wheel versions of the iPod to wane in favor of touch-screen-based models," he says. The iPod Classic may turn out to be the last iPod to use a hard drive (BusinessWeek.com, 10/10/07). Future versions are more likely to run exclusively on flash memory.

Dropping the phone functions meant dropping all the related chips, giving Apple designers a chance to make the device thinner than the iPhone. It also left more room for memory. The upper end of the iPod Touch line is the 16GB version that sells for $399. In the 8GB version taken apart by iSuppli, Toshiba supplied about $32 worth of flash memory chips. Other companies known to supply Apple with flash chips for use in the iPod and iPhone include Samsung, Hynix Semiconductor and Micron Technology.

Chipmaker Samsung appears to have consolidated its hold on the entire iPod line, supplying the main video-audio chip for the Touch that is used in the iPod Classic and iPod Nano

(BusinessWeek.com, 9/18/07). The chip goes for a little more than $13. Samsung also supplied about $12 worth of memory.

Other chip suppliers include Broadcom, which supplied a controller chip for the touch screen, and STMicroelectronics, which supplied motion sensor chips that allow the device to reorient pictures and videos when it's moved from the vertical to the horizontal position. Texas Instruments supplied a video driver chip.

Since the Touch sports the same multitouch-enabled screen as the iPhone, costs associated with the screen account for nearly $44 of the device's material cost, iSuppli estimates. While Epson, Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology and Sharp Electronics all supply the liquid-crystal display, the touch-sensitive portions of the display come from Germany's Balda, Taiwan's Wintex, and Optrex, a unit of Asahi Glass.

Given prior history, the iPod Touch will probably stay on the market in its current form for about a year, only to be upgraded sometime in the third quarter of 2008. During that year, Rassweiler expects, Apple will sell about 8.5 million units. In terms of sales popularity, that would put the Touch about midway in Apple's family. The iPod Nano is the most popular model, expected to sell nearly 28 million units in 2008, while the Classic will sell about 3.5 million units, according to iSuppli forecasts.

Nintendo Earnings Nearly Double on Wii

TOKYO (AP) -- Nintentdo's profit for the first nine months of the fiscal year nearly doubled from the previous year, propelled by booming sales of its hit Wii game machine, the company said Thursday.

Group net profit at Nintendo Co., which also makes Super Mario and Pokemon games, totaled 258.93 billion yen ($2.43 billion) for the nine months ended Dec. 31, up 96.3 percent from 131.92 billion yen for the same period in fiscal 2006. Nintendo didn't give a quarterly breakdown.

The Wii, with its wandlike remote-controller, is winning over novices -- including the elderly and women -- to video games.

The machines, which first went on sale in late 2006, have been snatched up as soon as they arrive at stores, outstripping the competing PlayStation 3 from Sony Corp. and Xbox 360 from Microsoft Corp.

Nintendo said it has now sold more than 20 million Wii machines worldwide, 14.29 million of them during the latest three quarters.

New Wii games, including ''Wii Fit,'' ''Super Mario Galaxy'' and ''Wii Sports,'' have been a success.

Sales during the nine months jumped rose 84.7 percent from a year ago to 1.316 trillion yen ($12.35 billion) from 712.59 billion.

The Kyoto-based company kept its profit forecast at 275 billion yen ($2.58 billion), for the full fiscal year through March 31, but raised its sales forecast to 1.63 trillion yen ($15.29 billion), up from an earlier estimate of 1.55 trillion yen.

Nintendo said its DS portable machine, which comes with a touch panel, has also been very popular, marking 24.5 million units in sales during the nine months through December 2007, adding to cumulative sales of 64.79 million.

The DS has also introduced new kinds of gaming, including brain teasers, virtual pets and cooking recipes.

Nintendo said it expects to sell 18.5 million Wiis and 29.5 million DS machines for the fiscal year through March 31.

Nintendo shares slipped 2.4 percent in Tokyo to 53,200 yen ($499) shortly before earnings were released.

Blackberry 8300 Review

Design & Construction

The Curve uses the newer generation BlackBerry form factor: it's still a relatively thin yet broad device with a large screen, but (as with the Pearl and the 8800) the Curve now uses a center-mounted trackball for menu navigation and selection rather than the traditional three-way jog dial common to earlier BlackBerry phones.

Like all BlackBerries it's considerably larger than the average phone. However, with the addition of multimedia capabilities such as a 2-megapixel digital camera and the ability to play QVGA-quality video and music, the Curve is remarkably compact. The Curve's size also makes for a very usable keyboard, though not quite as large as the slide-out keyboards on some smartphones. Entering text on the keyboard is quite comfortable and speedy for anyone familiar with BlackBerry keyboards.

The overall design of the 8300 is simple yet stylish, with only two connectors and logically placed buttons. This might look like yet another business device, but it's a business device with class ... and a few toys hidden inside. The design of the BlackBerry Curve 8300 is perfectly suited to its messaging focus. It is comfortable to hold, solidly built, and offers a fantastic keyboard with a large and readable display. It doesn't get much better than this on today's market.

iPod Touch Review

Apple's new iPod Touch is a little confusing. It looks just like an iPhone, but it's not a phone and it lacks other iPhone features, such as a camera and Bluetooth. And, while the iPod Touch neither looks nor acts anything like a traditional iPod – and offers only a tenth the capacity of a similar-sized iPod Classic – it does perform iPod functions, and that's how Apple positions it.

Perhaps the most confusing element is the iPod Touch's wireless feature. Obviously aimed at selling iTunes content, WiFi incidentally provides Web access via a special version of Safari and a YouTube application, but email is conspicuously absent.

What we have here is an odd duck, a hybrid. It can't replace an iPhone as a integrated combination of camera, phone and media player, and it can't replace an iPod Nano as a tiny music player or an iPod Classic holding 160 GB of material. More than anything else, it probably serves best as an introduction to Apple's revolutionary new "multi-touch" user interface.

This introduction will cost you $299 (for an 8GB model), or $399 for the 16GB version that was the only model in stock when we bought ours.

iPhone Review

The word "revolutionary" is thrown around a lot in the world of high technology. Once in a while, something comes along that actually deserves the label. In 1984, the Macintosh revolutionized personal computing and set the pattern for every computer user interface since then. Twenty three years later, Apple has started another revolution with the iPhone.

Despite the widespread adoption of mobile phones, owners don't love their handsets. Some, such as the Motorola RAZR and Q and the Blackberry Curve, offer striking hardware design but a software personality that is complex, hard to use and confusing. And some cellular phone carriers, such as Verizon, inflict painfully slow, custom-branded interfaces on their subscribers. Most people simply accept the pain as part of the experience.

Apple decided that it doesn't have to be that way and set out to design a better mousetrap. In doing so, the company is turning the cell phone industry on its head — and aiming to get a slice of that $115 billion pie.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs's greatest successes have come from the consumer market. The original Apple computer, created by Steve Wozniak and marketed by Steve Jobs, sold to hobbyists. The Apple II was marketed to families. The Macintosh was the computer "for the rest of us." Pixar exists solely for consumer entertainment. The iMac? Consumer. iPod? Consumer. iTunes? Consumer. All huge successes for Apple.

With iPhone, Apple is taking its consumer market focus, sense of design and user interface expertise into a huge existing market. And that is the risk. With the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPod and iTunes. Apple entered a small market and grew it into a huge market. But there are dozens of major companies already in the mobile phone handset and carrier space, and competition is cut-throat. (The same week that Apple introduced iPhone, LG and Prada introduced the equally stunning KE850 touchscreen smartphone, with similar design, screen and specifications - and a $700 price tag.)

Handset makers try to one-up each other in features to garner orders from carriers (who subsidize the handsets to win subscribers), while carriers ruthlessly play handset makers against each other to get the best price and control what features are available to their subscribers, and at what price.

Apple enters a market in a position traditionally considered one of weakness — carriers have all the power, says convention wisdom. Yet Apple has crafted a deal with AT&T to sell iPhones and service, without the traditional handset subsidy, and is even rumored to get a cut of iPhone subscription revenue. And AT&T gets new customers, with a lower acquisition cost, and the opportunity to sell service upgrades (see Pricing, below). And did we mention that iPhone customers are locked into AT&T for two years?

Apple and AT&T are breaking all the rules. How well will it work? It all depends on how well iPhone delivers on its promises.

iPhone tackles the truly hard part of the puzzle — the user experience. Companies such as Palm, Nokia and Motorola have attempted this before, but the results have never been particularly satisfying. Where existing handset makers have replaced menus with full-color animated icons and warning messages with Windows-style dialog boxes, Apple has reinvented the user interface from the ground up. And instead of the limited WAP mobile "web" and unreadably small email interfaces, Apple has fully integrated core Internet web and email functionality into the device.

Apple has turned using a mobile phone from a chore into a pleasure, and has beautifully and seamlessly integrated Internet tools into the package. Like the Apple II, the Macintosh and the iPod, iPhone is posed to win hearts and minds and leave competitors scrambling to catch up for years.