An interesting article showed up in Newsweek this month about iPods being used by soldiers in the field (in particular the iPod Touch). And they are not being used to just play music, though that probably happens too, but to run critical applications. As commercial products, those you and I use everyday, get more powerful, they approach capabilities originally embedded in much more expensive devices. And not only are the devices cheaper, they are essentially more powerful and quite a bit more flexible.

Using a commercial product for such a crucial military role is a break from the past. Compared with devices built to military specifications, iPods are cheap. Apple, after all, has already done the research and manufacturing without taxpayer money. The iPod Touch retails for under $230, whereas a device made specifically for the military can cost far more.

In fact, today at Amazon the low-end 8 megabyte iPod Touch is $218.85 with free two-day shipping.

The trend to cheaper, faster, and more powerful consumer products, has been fueling a revolutionary change for the military, enabling them to adopt commercial products and leverage them for their needs. Traditionally every item was purpose-built to meet special requirements—mostly because we did not have commercial products that came anywhere close. But now commercial products surpass many military specifications and with drastically lower costs.

There is also the fact that we are solving problems (as noted in the article: translations, research, data collection and sharing) with software instead of hardware. Software is always cheaper. But who would have thought that the computer of choice for running these software applications would be an iPod—originally conceived to play music and videos.

Once you have a computer in your hand, no matter it’s small size and cost, many, many things are possible.