Why Is Apple Holding Back iPod, iPhone Features?

The details of Apple’s new iPod line are pouring in and one thing is obvious. It’s all evolutionary, not revolutionary.

The iPod nano does video. The iPod classic holds more. The iPod touch is an iPhone without a phone. So where are the features everyone really wants?

For a little over an hour I received Wil Gomez’s running report and commentary on Apple’s iPod event—The Beat Goes On. That means new paint, new generation, new features, nothing revolutionary at all.

Everybody on the planet who cares was expecting an iPod that looks and feels like an iPhone, though priced less. It’s early in the holiday buying season so we were right to expect upgrades to the iPod nano, iPod classic, even the shuffle got new paint.

Apple has everything priced within dollars so there’s no real excuse not to buy a media player from anyone else but Apple, right? As Apple becomes more of a consumer gadget oriented company, it’s also not as innovative or so quick to move the product line and features into the future.

Other than the $200 price drop, nothing Apple released today was earth-shattering, groundbreaking, or unexpected. Except for what wasn’t introduced.

You gotta like the iPod touch. It’s an iPhone without a phone, still has Safari and WiFi, and now the ability to buy songs from iTunes WiFi Mobile Store. That’s good, but hardly innovative. Do customers really want to do that?

My favorite new feature is ringtones. 99-cents is competitive, and I get to choose my own tone or build one from the iTunes Store, which starts with 500,000 “ringtonable” songs. That ain’t shabby, folks.

What’s missing? Besides a Steve Jobs presentation which ends with somebody putting everyone in the audience to sleep. Will says he heard snores after 30 seconds of Starbucks’ Howard Schultz on stage.

What’s missing? Not the obvious. Apple is treading very carefully into VoIP—voice over IP technology via iChat, or Skype or whatever. Those “must have” features are not included in the iPhone or in the iPod touch, though clearly they were made for such handheld devices.

So, where are they? Apple doesn’t want to upset the cell phone carriers by introducing features that compete with cell phone usage minutes on their networks. So, no iChat, no Skype, no video camera for conferencing. It won’t happen. For now.

Where’s Mail in the iPod touch? Seriously. It has WiFi. It has icon space. But no Mail. Again, Apple wants you to buy an iPod touch just for the music and videos (which they sell to you), and not for much in the way of online connectivity, Safari notwithstanding.

Once Apple has Europe and Asian cell phone markets tied up and a successful launch is completed, and once the US carriers cough up the money (and the exclusive agreement with AT&T ends), then look for Apple to drop in iChat, a video camera, Mail in the iPod, and maybe even Skype.

For now, Apple is not thinking different. They’re thinking like a consumer gadget company with markets to protect, not markets to conquer.