All we can say is, Jobs bless the speed of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office-- or, rather, the glacial lack thereof, since it gives us "new" material which is actually stuff that happened a few years ago. Woo-hoo! What better way to pass the time during an extended Drama Lull™ than to dissect further evidence of that holiest of holy grails, the wirelessly-transmitting iPod? See, faithful viewer Dinosaurius tipped us off to the fact that AppleInsider has the skinny on an Apple application filed way back in April of last year that seeks a patent for a "media player system," and, well, it beats workin', anyway.

The filing describes, along with other components of the system, a "hand held media player that includes a transmitter for transmitting information over a wireless connection"; said player can be used to transmit a selected "media item" from the handheld to "one or more remote recipients," or to "at least transmit a continuous music feed to one or more personal tuning devices." The language is necessarily vague, of course, but anyone who isn't thinking "wireless iPod" should at least take a gander at the included diagram, which clearly shows an iPod with a big, honkin' zigzaggy antenna (or is that a resistor that escaped from an electrical schematic?) jutting out the top, beaming what are apparently Media Rays™ to another iPod, a PowerBook, a G3 iMac connected to an AirPort Base Station-looking "docking station," and a variety of little handheld receivers apparently equipped with speakers and screens.

This obviously ties in nicely with the whole AirPort Express thing, since the one huge omission from the whole AirTunes setup is a simple way to control music playback without having to trudge back to your keyboard and mouse every time you want to skip a song or two. (Sure, now you can use a Keyspan Express Remote or a Bluetooth phone and Salling Clicker, but we're talking about an out-of-the-box Apple solution, here.) Why not just play music over AirTunes directly from an AirPort-equipped iPod? Don't forget, a few months back Apple was advertising for a couple of "iPod Hardware System Integrators" and specified experience with GSM, Bluetooth, and 802.11 wireless communications technologies as a requirement, so there was already at least some indication that iPods will be gaining some sort of wireless transmission capabilities-- and this patent application may offer a glimpse into Apple's intended extension of the Digital Hub.

Of course, just to keep you from getting too happy (we can't have that!), we feel compelled to remind you all that the filing of a patent in no way indicates that the technology described within is necessarily being incorporated into an active-development product-- or that it ever will be. Heck, you don't even need a working prototype to patent an invention, so the application isn't proof of anything more than Apple having put some thought into the idea a couple of years ago. That said, adding AirTunes capability is a pretty obvious improvement to the iPod line-up, and short-range 'Pod-to-'Pod broadcasting could be the killer app that gets 90 percent of existing owners to trade up to the latest models overnight. Here's hoping that if and when AirPods finally show up, the antennas are on the inside.