14 DAY TRIAL // Although the announcements came out of nowhere and took everyone by surprise, it looks like the Nike+iPod Kit is not something entirely new, and that Apple has been contemplating similar possibilities for quite some time now.
A recently surfaced Apple patent, filed on November 24, 2004 discusses an accelerometer that is embedded in an iPod, and gauges the foot strides of the user, which it uses to determine what music to play or how it should be played, in order to better match the rhythm of the exercise.
It seems that Apple contemplated two possibilities. The first would be changing the tempo of the song, playing songs faster as you run faster, and slower as you run slower. This approach however, seems unlikely even today because of the limited processing capabilities of the iPods.
The second alternative was to use the information about the pace of exercise to determine what songs match that pace and play one of those. The tempo information would be generated at the moment the songs were synced from a computer, and the relevant information would be stored in the song files themselves.
All this sounds similar yet still very different from what Apple ended up doing with Nike, but there is a very strong possibility that this patent, if not already used in the Nike+iPod Kit will be put to good use in some future similar product.