W riting for Business 2.0, Erick Schonfield has offered his predictions for 2005. With Apple being the hottest tech company on the planet, Mr. Schonfieldis list includes what he expects to see coming out of Cupertino during the next 12 months. High on his list is the iPhone and a Motorola-branded iPod.
"Long craved by the Mac faithful, a sleek, beautiful cell phone that doubles as a digital-music player is coming soon from Appleis iPod division," he wrote. "Although Steve Jobs has often dismissed the notion of such an offering because other companies are better at making phones, an already-announced but vague partnership with Motorola will allow Apple (AAPL) to stick to what it does best: great tech design."
Mr. Schonfield is likely referring to Steve Jobsi announcement that Motorola would be producing a phone that can play iTunes downloads. Apple executives have publicly said in recent weeks to expect such a phone in the first calendar quarter of 2005.
Mr. Schonfield also expects Motorola to release its own branded iPod "but with lower-capacity flash memory instead of a larger hard drive."
To cap his trifecta of predictions, Mr. Schonfield said we should look "for future iPods to incorporate a satellite radio (even a regular radio would be nice)."
The full article at Business 2.0 includes predictions for the DVR, Google, blogs, tech consolidation, nanotech and fuel cells, Chinese IPOs, and the word "passion."