Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Monday, May 08, 2006
When will mobile phones take over the audio player market?
It's clear one of the reasons Apple's iPod has been so successful is that it's a no-brainer to understand what it does and how to use it. That's always an issue when adding the same functionality to a multi-function device like a mobile phone. Most phones with multimedia support don't have dedicated buttons for that (not even as "Shift" functions on the existing keys). No doubt the symbiosis with iTunes has also been key to the iPod's success.
This article argues that once phones have hard disks the threat is real. I don't agree. Apple sells many more of the Flash models than the hard drive ditto, so with enough Flash memory in the phone (2 GB and up), a no-brainer user interface and support for iTunes etc DRM there are at least technical, and maybe also practical, reasons why mobile phones would compete head-on.
There are already many more phones sold that are capable of playing multimedia than the amount of iPods sold. Few of those phones are used for multimedia today though.
Down the road it will be interesting to utilize the mobile phone's radio for downloading multimedia, and we might be there in certain countries and with certain operators already, but most operators still charge too much for data to make this feasible.
Cell Phones' Hard Drives Could Doom MP3 Players - Yahoo! News
This article argues that once phones have hard disks the threat is real. I don't agree. Apple sells many more of the Flash models than the hard drive ditto, so with enough Flash memory in the phone (2 GB and up), a no-brainer user interface and support for iTunes etc DRM there are at least technical, and maybe also practical, reasons why mobile phones would compete head-on.
There are already many more phones sold that are capable of playing multimedia than the amount of iPods sold. Few of those phones are used for multimedia today though.
Down the road it will be interesting to utilize the mobile phone's radio for downloading multimedia, and we might be there in certain countries and with certain operators already, but most operators still charge too much for data to make this feasible.
Cell Phones' Hard Drives Could Doom MP3 Players - Yahoo! News
