I’d tweak it a little bit though. For example, if you search for an artist like for example… “Dream Theater” it should return the artist page instead of lists of songs related to Dream Theater.

So why so much interest in a 400$ phone plus a lot more for the service? The experience kicked everybody’s ass and still does, I think there are only 2 other players fighting back the iPhone, and those are Google’s Android and Palm. Although I think palm’s hardware is crappy, I think the overall experience is much better than an Android.

By the way, Nokia lost it. If I were them I’d buy palm.

You’re preaching to the choir regarding 3rd party support, especially Spotify I would expect that Apple would try to build an applications ecosystem for a potential TV platform just like they have for the iPhone, probably letting developers use the same code base they have for the 100k iPhone apps to get critical mass quickly, but offering a UI framework class adapted for a 10 foot experience, and a version of the iTunes store that can be navigated and let’s you install apps via a remote control, without need for a mouse or keyboard. I think that’s pretty much what you’re saying as well, I’d just like to see it inside my TV, highly integrated into the TV and the remote control, rather than as a separate box, with a separate remote (that doesn’t have the TV controls) and a TV software that is just layer on top of a full OSX, requiring me to still use mouse and keyboard quite often to get things done.

Regarding the fact that everyone already has a TV/screen, and a box should be enough, I don’t really agree. I’ve been playing around with lots of HTPC solutions the last few years, the current one (which I’m the most pleased with) being a passively cooled HFX Classic HTPC with a FireDTV DVB-T tuner and elgato EyeTV software and 50″ LG50PC1R TV (chosen because it allows DVI over HDMI with arbitrary solutions that pixelmap 1:1 to the screens pixels, rather than interpolate to the nearest HDMI resolution, giving perfect resolution) , streams to your airtunes, re-encodes and syncs TV shows to your iPhone, and even let’s you stream live and recorded TV to your iPhone when you’re travelling. It’s a fantastic solution and it is what the living room TV experience should be like, and still, very very few people I know, even in the geek crowd, have this solution. Why is that? I think it is because no one has properly packaged this into a single product yet. A product that you plug in and switch on. I certainly spent considerable time to get this up and keeping it running.

I think Apple has a golden opportunity to create such a product and increase the consumer reach of advanced HTPC/TV solutions at least 1-2 orders of magnitude (just like they did with the smartphones when they introduced the iPhone).

Regarding innovation in TV screens, I would say that I think the UIs and software of most TVs and set top boxes today are pretty terrible, so there is plenty to do on that level alone. But looking a bit deeper, I think that it is easy to underestimate the value of really good integration between the different hardware and software pieces. I’m generally a big believer in vertical integration. If you control the viewing experience all the way from content (encoding formats, resolution etc) to the software running on the hardware (OS and applications), to the screen and TV hardware (graphics acceleration, built in camera, IR “wiimote” transmitters etc), all they way to the layout of the remote control (think e.g. Wiimote pointing device plus swipe gestures to switch between channels, apps etc), you can probably create a really kick-ass user experience that is very hard to do if all the different hardware pieces are manufactured by different companies and have to be interopable according to standards (the windows world). It is very hard to innovate whey you only control a singe horizontal step in a vertical chain…

Imagine an Apple TV box with support for 3rd part apps like spotify, hulu, youtube, svtplay etc. Apple’s strength has always been the software in combination with hardware and the rest of the apple ecosystem anyway, not a lot of software in screens they can improve.