This past January, Apple filed ten new iPod designs that were published by the European Trademarks and Designs office on March 14. However, as Macsimum News pointed out in its coverage of the filing, that office is different from the EU’s Patent Office, which means no report was included describing the functionality of the designs.
While it’s easy to speculate on what Apple could have in mind for the designs — one of them in particular clearly sports what looks like a cell phone keypad — there’s no way to know when, or even if, they will see the light of day. Macsimum News strongly believes that one of the designs could be a game controller, thus confirming the rumors that Apple plans to start producing iPod games, but that’s not clear either.
Macsimum News seems to believe that Apple will start producing different iPods that fulfill different purposes, pointing to “a specialty iPod nano [designed] to work [with] Nike’s Air Zoom Moire runners,” but the Nike+iPod Sport Kit simply works with a standard iPod nano. Users don’t have to buy an iPod nano created specifically for jogging.
It would seem odd for Apple to abandon its popular click wheel controller, and there’s nothing stopping the company from simply producing a gamepad that the user could plug into an iPod’s dock port when playing games, if it does indeed want to start selling iPod games. In the end, these may be nothing more than red herrings.
 (Image is a compilation of filing images put together by Engadget from AppleInsider’s coverage.) |