Edible Apple

T3 has an interesting interview with Greg Joswiak, Apple’s VP of iPod and iPhone marketing.  The interview highlights just how important the app store, and in particular games, have been to the success of the iPod touch.  He notes that the past quarter was Apple’s biggest non-holiday iPod quarter.  People have been predicting declining iPod sales for years now, but Apple has been adept at producing new models that people are willing to pay for.  While iPod saturation is inevitable, it’s clear that there’s still a lot of life left in everyone’s favorite MP3 player.

“Having a second generation with this contoured design, and continuing to have this large three and a half-inch screen is all nice but where we’re getting the benefit is with the apps store. The apps store really changed the dynamics in a big way for the iPod Touch because, you know, in over 100 days we’ve had over 6,000 applications, with over 200 million downloads. So there are 6,000 more reasons to buy an iPhone or an iPod Touch. But the biggest category of all in the apps store has been games. There are over 1,500 games and there’s a great affinity between the iPod Touch customer and those games. And that’s part of our positioning of it as the funnest iPod ever – you’ve got your music, your video, and your games.”

“And the gameplay I think has surprised a lot of people, because it’s not just the casual games. There are real 3D games, and it’s hard to imagine we’re only a little over 100 days into it. There are already so many games and as we look at it, to us it really seems this is the future of gameplay. Whereas a lot of these devices [Nintendo DS and Sony PSP] are more in the past. And a big part of that is not just the device itself, which is easier to carry, and has the touch display and accelerometer which is great for gameplay, but it’s the electronic distribution of the apps as well.”

Check out the full interview here.