There was quite a discussion in my post asking Will your next music
device be your cellphone?. The
author of Communities Dominates Brands responded, and Sandy backed up my
thoughts that it'll be some time before a cell phone can replace your
ipod/music player of choice. What I think is that it isn't a question
of technology - clearly cell phones are becoming tightly integrated,
multi function devices. But was makes an MP3 player good, and the iPod
really good, is the ease of use and the music catalog that is behind it.
Big music companies aren't going to release their songs as MP3s, they
want formats restricted by Digital Rights Management that gives them the
power to control how and when you play the songs you purchase. As long
as the music catalogs aren't available, or phones are restricted to 100
songs or some nonsense limit like that, then it won't matter how many
mp3/music capable phones are sold to the public even by next year. There
won't be much music to listen to on them.
Wired has an article on the Battle for the Soul of the MP3
Phone that is a
much more thorough explanation of the forces at work. Some choice
quotes, but really you should go read it and save me the trouble of
copying and pasting the good parts here.
What should a music phone offer? The specs aren't hard to figure out.
For starters, it should have clearly marked Pause and Play buttons so
as not to trip up people like Steve Jobs. It should sync quickly and
easily with your computer, and you should be able to use it to buy
music at a reasonable price. It should play music from iTunes or any
other music service. You should be able to choose different amounts of
memory, and whatever you decide on, it shouldn't be constrained to
100 songs - or any other arbitrary limi
For a carrier, the whole point of putting music on a cell phone is to
make money on data traffic from songs downloaded wirelessly. Carriers
also like to make money handling the billing for those downloads. Yet
the ROKR puts Apple's iTunes in charge. The only way to load music
onto the phone is to sync it with your computer; to buy new music, you
have to access the iTunes store through your computer, bypassing the
carrier's network and billing service. Even worse from the carriers'
point of view, iTunes would compete with the music stores they
themselves are setting up.
Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president of Nokia and head of its
multimedia group, has bad news for the labels. In an impossibly sleek
conference room at Nokia's steel and glass headquarters in Espoo, a
woodsy Helsinki suburb, Vanjoki is showing off the new N91, a 3G
Symbian handset that will go on sale this winter. As a music phone,
the N91 is everything the ROKR is not. It can hold a thousand songs or
more. It has a rugged 4-gigabyte hard drive as well as Wi-Fi and a
high-speed USB connection. "If you want to do file-sharing, this is
also possible," Vanjoki says. "Because this is not a mobile phone,
it is a computer.