[dylan604]

The one thing I had always wanted my ipod to do was stream, so I def agree with the lack of wireless being lame. Just because the greater majority of users felt it was okay and made it the most popular music device doesn't mean it wasn't lame to not have it.

[handrous]

Wifi's still pretty bad, but it was really bad then. Especially on consumer wifi routers, but most business set-ups sucked then, too. Dropped packets galore, signal-loss hiccups, and not enough bandwidth to make up for that by transferring large buffers really fast. Terrible for streaming. Probably way more battery-draining then than now, as well, since that kind of hardware has generally gotten a lot more efficient. Wouldn't be surprised if that efficiency has outpaced increasingly demanding standards.

[EDIT] I don't mean to be dismissive of a feature you'd have liked, I just think that, given the context of the time, I can totally understand why they'd not include that.

[dylan604]

As soon as I got an iPhone, I remember pointing Safari at an M3U link and was so happy to have streaming on a hand held device. It took many years, but it was finally doable. I was pleasantly surprised when the stream continued flowing even once the screen locked. That was still years before music apps became a thing, but I was snug as a bug listening to my website streams on mobile.

[toast0]

I did a little bit of streaming on a Nokia 3650, had to go down to 40kbps if i recall correctly, but the battery life would be minutes. Then my free data loophole ended and my dream of music streaming was postponed.

[kalleboo]

I did a lot of streaming on my Sony Ericsson K800i (2006). The local public broadcaster had a deal with the mobile operators to zero-rate their streams from data plans. Using 3G UMTS you actually got better reception inside buildings/basements/on trains etc than with FM radio which would fade in and out.

[numpad0]

I don't think 802.11b was that bad. 128kbps mp3 streaming was considered "high quality" back then, so average quality streams were within realms of bare UMTS 3G(384k down) as well as some wireless Ethernet standards at that time, 11b included.