Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Beatnik Offers Music Format For Low-Cost Phones doesn't say anything about the audio quality, and I very much doubt that an audio file 1/10 the size of MP3 would sound equally good (or bad). AAC, a much newer format than MP3, is roughly half the size for similar quality, so this is a quite a big leap. I'm sure there's a quality trade-off, but in this case it might not matter, as the music will only be played on the phones it's been downloaded on. Not that I would ever buy music in lesser quality than CD, but it's clear the consumer market has already accepted lesser quality than CD via iTunes etc.