Slashdot Mirror
Apple, Motorola Plan An iTunes-Friendly Phone
PabloJones writes "Apple and Motorola have come together to create a new mp3-enabled cell phone, according to this Reuters article. It says that the device will be capable of storing about 12 songs, and will be fully integrated with iTunes. Perhaps this is a beginning of a new relationship between the two companies, after the PowerPC problems between the two in recent years."
Press Release from Motorola
Yes, I understand that might be considered karma whoring, but at least it's informative. Enjoy.
-s4xton
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
The Nokia 6230 (and the forthcoming 6260) are somewhat more impressive, using interchangeable MMCs to store up to and above 128Mb of data. And I don't think iTunes compatibility is a great reason to endure such lousy storage capacity.
The iTunes MUSIC STORE uses AAC encoded music (an open standard) with Apple's proprietary FairPlay DRM.
The iTunes APPLICATION, which is usuable with our without the iTunes Music Store, supports MP3, AAC, AAC+Fairplay, WAV, Audible audiobooks, Apple Lossless Compression (ALC), possibly more I can't remember. It can rip to MP3, AAC, or ALC.
The poster of the story got it a bit wrong. It's not a dozen songs, it is dozenS of songs. So think more like a couple of albums worth, not one album worth of songs.
Remember that most songs will probably be full 128 kbit iTunes Music Store AAC files. Judging from the songs I've bought from the iTMS each song will take up around 3.5 MB so a dozen will take 42 MB. That adds up pretty quick. You could fit about 36 songs onto a 128 MB flash card, which sounds reasonable for a flash-based cell phone/MP3 player.
Sapere aude!
Two years ago, Chris Galvin was at the healm of Motorola, now it is Ed Zander. To say that the difference is night and day would still be an understatement. Ed Zander actually works for a living. The market knows this, and so does Apple.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
There were some rumors that Apple would sue Motorola for breach of contract once Apple fully migrated to the IBM processor; I don't think that's happened 100% yet, but Apple's pretty close. The suit would've been based on the grounds that Moto didn't give Apple the year warning they were required to that they were going to end their desktop PPC chip, which necessitated Apple scrambling to find a replacement--originally, IBM didn't have a lot of interest in supplying Apple, and only bolted on the AltiVec co-processor at a later date.
I strongly suspect that this relationship is related to terms to arise out of an out of court settlement between Moto and Apple--it's clearly no longer in Apple's interest to sue Moto, so this was worth something to Moto (if the suit had any merit; but it sounded like it may well have.)
I don't know if it's better for Apple or for Moto to play iTMS music on Moto phones; but it does mean that QT is there instead of WMA, which is indeed worth something to Apple. My hunch is that Apple was awarded this privilege for free, and in return they'd drop the suit.
--
$tar -xvf