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More on Apple/Motorola Joint Cell Phone Venture
1+(smarterThanYou) writes "Forbes.com has an article with updates on the previous Slashdot story on the Motorola/Apple iTunes compatible mobile phone.
'Apple Computer and Motorola could soon show us the mobile phone they are developing to play music purchased from Apple's iTunes online music store.
'We've said we have something coming on this in the first half of 2005 and we're definitely on schedule for that. Hopefully you'll be able to see more about it soon,' says Eddy Cue, vice president in charge of applications at Apple.'" Theories about this device showing up at the next MacWorld Expo abound.
Could this phone be the rumoured flash-based iPod?
I also want a Moof ring tone!
Cellular would be the next logical area for apple to explorer. While i think a dedicated Apple Cellular phone would be interesting i don't think it would fly. A joint venture would be a good alternative. Make a slimmed downed ituens for a mobile device. Though i dobt VZW would carry such a cool phone...i mean they finally got bluetooth and look how that mess turned out.
-Will
If Eddie Cue has pre-empted the suprise and fawning over what could have been a Steve Jobs suprise announcement then Mr. Cue may very well be a Former Vice President by the time MacWorld Expo rolls around.
well, motorola is the company that is going to be delivering the application, so I think the apple related logo at the top has got to go........
anyway, Eddy Cue is about to be fired, leaking a comment a couple weeks before macworld, and a couple of days before christmas????? not that any of his comments are going to slow down the sale of any apple produced products, it is still a slip and he must be cut loose, there can't be any leaks in the apple ship
it seems that this phone + mp3 player might be the convergence of the "flash based" ipod and the apple/motorola venture. Mac heads gotta have their lifeblood flowing...rumors...mmmm
I wonder whether this will be branded as an Apple phone or as a Motorola phone. Seeing as Motorola's marketing gusto seemed to die with the Star-Tac, I'm personally rooting for an Apple phone.
So many things are becoming an addition to the mobile phone, and different groups teaming up to cover their core areas. Obviously Sony are placed fairly well at the moment with their audio, imaging, comms and gaming devices. Who else will team up to compete?
Personally, I'd love to see the Nintendo technologies meshed with Apple and Motorola. To me both Apple and Nintendo, lean towards highly usable, simple technology with high build quality.
Who else is next?
-----
Glen Williams
Every phone that I could use in my area is hobbled by SOB carriers who view BT as headset only, and charge for transfer of photos, ringtones and everything else.
Not that I want the latest MP3 of Poo Doody as my ringtone, or want to take blurry, oversaturated photos with my phone...It's the principle of the thing...
May Apple destroy the phone market as they have beaten the mp3 market.
Through doing BS like this, they are destroying that image that has been so successful.
This may be a whacky idea, but have you considered waiting until you actually see a product before you condemn it?
Hm...it doesn't look like they'll be able to use the name iPhone...Nuvio's got it locked up:
http://www.iphone.com/
I bet you'll have to madly spin around a little touch wheel in order to dial it. Like a rotary phone.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/jul/17isync.h tml Cingular and Apple are already buddies. With Moto's exclusive offering of the new RAZR phone with Cingular, perhaps are budding relationship will truly blossom with an iPhone to tie it all together.
Go Apple.
1) In Sino-Soviet Korea, a Beowulf cluster of iTunes-enabled fone overlords (who I, for one, welcome) plays Natalie Portman naked and petrified in hot grits to old people in a positive manner.
2) ???
3) Profit! Because the iPod has made Apple money hand over fist, so a fone that has the same general function (could this be the flash iPod everyone is talking about?) will likely be a giant seller.
Problem is that cell fones are typically loss leaders for SOMEBODY, and we all know the iTMS is barely profitable, so I just don't see where the money would be coming from here.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
- iTunes ringback (what the caller hears is an iTune bought by the callee)
- Distinctive iTune ringtone (I can program the ringtone I hear with an iTune I bought, according to the caller)
- iTunes will not only sync with iPod but also with iPhone
- iPhone to iPhone gifts (I bought an iTune and I give it to you)
- iPhone to iPhone recommendations (I recommend an iTune to you)
- Express your feeling with iTune (when you call her, she hears a music you selected)
- ...
it's just the beginning man! Wait 'till Apple sells movies, documentaries and radio shows...You hreak the number you want to dial either by;
That said, I'm sure it will be a hit with the
--#voxlator
Who's going to buy an iPod phone when we've all already gone out and bought Ngages?
i have mod points, i can modded you up but i'll just reply instead.
... and now after teaming up with sony -- they capture the old market formerly held by nokia.
for now, iPod is doing well; but sooner or later some competitors will catch up.
this things happens in the philippines and i dunno how it affects other parts of the world. 7 years ago, star-tac is the king; it was overrun by nokia when nokia 3210 comes out of the market -- and then stays the lead until now and very very few people are buying motorola phones. 4 years ago, ericsson is not doing well in mobile phone market
This joint venture by Apple and Motorola is a win-win for both of them. Design/Interface/Usability teams will add value to a technology competitive products from Motorola -- like what Sony did to Ericsson.
Okay, so it's now wireless. But I bet it'll have less space than a Nomad.
Lame.
1) Uh, CodeWarrior was by Metrowerks, and AFAIK, there was never an OS X version. Apple's tools for OS 9 were less than useful in comparison to CodeWarrior, but by all accounts, Xcode is infinitely superior. The fact that it's free is a nice side benefit, but serious developers don't really care that much about what the development environment costs as long as it's a good value.
2) The rug got pulled out from all the other cloners, too, most of whom were doing FAR more business than the Starmax series.
3) The PPC/CHRP/AIM alliance (whatever they're calling it this week) had a lot of problems that may or may not have been Motorola's fault. Until the PPC 970 (G5) and 750fx (G3), IBM wasn't exactly delivering that many CPUs to Apple, which leads into...
The G4 debacle was really the first time Mot had trouble delivering what Apple asked for. After that it was all downhill. Of course, Mot's semiconductor division is a separate company now (Freescale).
Your last point is really your only good one, but I can't say as I disagree with your conclusion. Jobs has been pretty angry with Mot ever since the whole G4 debacle, but the Freescale spin-off might have softened that anger somewhat. I suspect Mot had to do some serious ass-kissing to get this deal to fly.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
For some reason, I don't think this idea of yours will take off...
Codewarrior 7 ran on OS X. Codewarrior was bought by Motorola, but whereas Codewarrior saved Apples bacon back during the the 68k to PPC transition, they were late to the game for OS X and simply couldn't keep pace with the excellent tools that came over with NeXT.
Codewarrior positioned itself for cross-platform development instead, which is what interested Motorola, but wasn't compatible with Apple's focus on superior APIs.
Apple didn't kill Codewarrior as much as Codewarrior chased different markets.
Mots influence on the G4 problem was refusing to allow IBM to fab G4s or to improve their processes, which really left Apple in a bind. After all, G4s still run on a 167MHz bus, which is a disaster for a modern desktop CPU.
Please, for the love of god, I just want a phone that will actually make phone calls in my apartment. *whimper*
I'm not in the boonies. I'm a mere 20 miles East of San Francisco in an area where the median home prices is over $700,000. People have money.
But I can't make a phone call from my apartment. Verizon comes close, but Cingular, AT&T Wireless, Sprint, Nextel - none of them work.
My old ass MetroPCS phone is the only phone that I get more than 3 "bars" with. And it doesn't have a camera, either.
What ever happened to making call quality the #1 priority? I don't want a camera phone! I don't want an mp3 player! I just want to make friggin PHONE CALLS!
*head as-plodes*
maybe the rumors are way off and this is what the flash iPod is. the Moto V710 phone has a removable memory card you can put MP3 files on and play them as ringtones, or listen to them on the speakerphone. i guess headphones or a carkit would be possible too? who knows. you have to read the article knowing some are quotes from Apple and Moto and some is filler/speculation by Forbes. not to diss them, but it's possible they don't totally know and are off the mark with their speculation.
and i quote:
If there is no OS X version of CodeWarrior, what is this, and why does Apple use Codewarrior as a benchmark for speed against XCode (with Apple even admitting that Codewarrior is still faster)? And yes, Motorola created CodeWarrior. Metrowerks might even still be owned by them.
CodeWarrior was released in the early '90s by a small Canadian startup named Metrowerks. When Apple transitioned to the PowerPC and was only able to come up with an abominably slow, clunky and cumbersome development system for it (a set of multipass C++ compilers bundled with their ancient MPW evironment), Metrowerks saved the day by shipping CodeWarrior which had a kick-ass IDE (inspired by Think C, formerly Lightspeed) and a fast, efficient one pass compiler and linker. A few years later Motorola released a compiler plug-in for Codewarrior; then Metrowerks started trying to branch out into other areas such as embedded systems and cross-development systems. Eventually they were bought by Motorola by the end of the '90s.
Now the mugger will get a phone with his mp3 player
Motorola already had a real phone (and I still do). This beast has a plain old LCD display (not color), takes no pictures, has survived numerous falls onto concrete, has battery life that won't quit, and a speakerphone that works fairly well. I almost switched carriers when I was told I would have to "upgrade" after they "upgraded" their network. It took 3 or 4 calls before I actually got someone who let me keep the phone. So I stuck with them.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
How about Apple and Motorola produce a phone that fully synchronizes with iSync for all the productivity items like contacts and calendars? The only folks that make such devices are Nokia and Siemens. I want everything down to the photo on the Address Book entry... plus decent enough e-mail for getting warning messages from the servers.
Nokia beat Apple with a rotary cell phone, it's their Nokia 7280 (http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,62356,00.html).
I suppose it's only a small thing, but I think Apple could at least bring their good design sense to bear.
For all the huge number of cell-phone makers and phones, about 70% of them are completely awful in design, and most of the rest merely OK; even manuf.s who are normally good at product design, like Sony, seem to completely lose it when it comes to cell-phones (in Sony's case, they seem to be partnering with Ericson, so perhaps it's the latter's fault).
We live, as we dream -- alone....
for now, iPod is doing well; but sooner or later some competitors will catch up.
Maybe, but this is harder to do than with the phones.
The iPod is so dominant not only because of the iPod but also iTunes and iTMS. Not many companies out there have the talent to pull off hardware/software/service solutions so elegantly. Even MS, who should be able to easily take care of the last two is having trouble - the vast majority of online music sales are AAC, not WMA.
I think that Apple's interest in a phone is not only to deliver some kind of music service, but I'd look for some kind of iChat hooks as well - either simple texting or building to some kind of eventual videophone functionality. Quicktime in the phone is overkill for just music - there are bigger goals here.
Apple's iPod hardware buddy HP seems to sell might-look-good-in-white, curiously out-of-stock bluetooth stereo headphones, but without a mic. Hmmm...
Nah, it'll probobly be like "No bluetooth. Clunkier than a Nokia. Lame." anyways : )
People drop 'em all the time. My phone (Ericsson T100) can survive just about anything, but I doubt it would go as well if it had a HDD in it.
Check your renters'/homeowners' associations.
This happens in my area, too, and it's caused by the NIMBY attitude of people when they see a cell phone tower. Even if the cellular provider proposes a camouflaged tower (one that looks like a tree, etc.), they are beaten back by the pseudoscience wackos threatening health problems. They've even taken out existing towers ("Too close to the schools--think of the children!"), which I suspect is why you remember your MetroPCS phone fondly. As a result, my nearest cell tower is a zillion miles away and, like you, I have no coverage indoors.
I'd prefer to have an enter key rather than a mp3 phone anyday.
See?
I win!
"Your current wait is expected to be two hours, twenty-five minutes...."
One can also see this with keyboards. Many PC ship with 10 or more extra keys to execute specilized commands. While this may be useful for a small subset, it annoys me that the extra keys make the keyboard bigger than it has to be and it causes confusion. For instance, on my compaq laptop there is a row a ancillary buttons across the top. The most important button, the start up button, is just one these buttons, barely differentiated. Everytime I want to turn on the machine I must look for the button. Time wasted because someone wanted to look technologically advanced by including lots of buttons.
The phone I want from apple has the structure of iPod mini, but much smaller. No keyboard, no speaker, no mic. Bluetooth to a headset. Scrollwheel selects person to call. Sync to adress book and datebook. If the networks would get full caller ID, like the bells, numbers could be stored with names. In fact I have often wondered how hard it would be add phone capability to the mini, and, of course, bluetooth.
The keyboard on a phone is useful for texting, but a popup keyboard and the scrollwheel could be just as useful, expecially with predictive technology and a phrase bank. I will never buy a phone in which the data cannot be gathered from my laptop. The current cellphone is evolved from 70's technology. It is time for something different.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I simply would not accept that limitation from a carrier. It's an abuse of their service. Do the sensible thing and change you carrier to someone who doesn't cripple your phone and your computing experience.
That's the thing, though. You can't. In America, the providers have banded together on this one and locked-out such functionality. And with a free market fundamentalist for a president, for Americans this is unlikely to change via regulatory pressures from the communications commission.
http://treomac.com/v-web/portal/cms/modules.php?na me=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=32
I can throw a little more gas onto the Apple phone rumors. I was on a train this weekend, watching an episode of the Simpsons on my Treo600. The gentleman sitting across from me asked me how I liked the phone. I told him I loved it and we began a tech conversation. He mentioned that he worked for Motorola. I told him I was a Macintosh consultant, and then he dropped the bomb! "I've got a scoop for you", he teased.
Apparently some of his associates had been telling him earlier in the week about an Apple branded phone that had been circulating around the office at Motorola. The phone had Motorola components, but most certainly had Apple brandings on it. He said that he did not have a chance to handle the phone, but that his direct supervisor did. The phone was "sleek and sexy" in her words. He mentioned that there was talk amongst the people who had seen it that itunes and iphoto would factor into this device somehow. They also said that the phone had a slot on the top (media slot?) as well as what looked to be a usb 2.0 port on the bottom.
All very interesting. He gave me his card, so I'll be sure to press him for more details in the coming weeks.
Stay Tuned!
_________________
Tony Ricciardi
Administrator
TreoMac.com
Also, from another source:
It's basically the successor to the Motorola E398, but with iTunes, and extensive Apple influence and iPod integration. I haven't seen it yet, but my info is direct from Moto top people.
The current Motorola E398 was a tri-band GSM bar form factor phone, with a large screen, TransFlash slot, Bluetooth, camera, media player, speakerphone, and FM tuner. And since this offering is GSM, and Steve Jobs has twice trotted out Cingular CEO Stephen Carter at Macworld keynotes, and given other carriers' resistance to the idea of iTunes on a phone (for reasons of either not wanting to provide bandwidth for such a service at a reasonable cost, OR being opposed to having full computer/device connectivity via Bluetooth bypassing their networks), it would appear that Cingular/AT&T might be a good candidate to carry such a device.
And for all those who think that Motorola phones suck OR are only basing your opinion on NEXTEL phones, trust me: they've gotten a LOT better, and actually have some excellent offerings (e.g., RAZR V3 and v710, Verizon crippling aside).
I have to admit I'm a bit curious about all the effort and publicity surrounding this, but I guess with Apple and Motorola being former bedroom buddies and with iTunes and Apple as hot as they are right now, anything involving either would make news.
Most of Apple's functions (Bluetooth, MP3, AAC, 3GPP, contact synchroniztion) already work with Nokia's Symbian platform right now, except for iTunes' DRM - which, admittedly, is the show-stopper. But why would you not also try to partner with, or license your stuff to, another company who has done much of the grunt work already ?
IIRC the Samsung Uproar was the first phone to come out with mp3 playback capability. For the technology available at the time (2001) it was a great device - 64MB flash player with a decent phone.
One of the best features of that phone was completely unintentional - since it had stereo headphones for both phone and mp3 player usage you could have two people talk on the phone at the same time without having to use a speakerphone by giving each person one of the earpieces.
Have you seen my stapler?
> So many things are becoming an addition to the mobile phone, and different
> groups teaming up to cover their core areas. Obviously Sony are placed fairly
> well at the moment with their audio, imaging, comms and gaming devices.
Personally, I think that most additions that are bolted on a cell phone result in a substandard product.
Consider a phone + camera combo.
On one hand, I want my phone to be small and light.
On the other hand, I want my digicam to take quality pictures, which requires a decently sized photosites and good optics (with lots of lens elements).
These requirements are at odds with each other.
On the other hand, adding audio functions to a cell phone should be doable without exessively compromising quality.
Is there a reasonably priced cell phone + AM/FM radio + MP3 player combo in existance?
Isn't this the same news organization that has such wonderful writers as Daniel Lyons, and publishes glowing articles about what a wonderful case SCO has? Wern't they buying SCO's story even as of August 2004?
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
It's like George Carlin once said:
"If you nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it from you."
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The last analyst report I saw pointed out that the entire revenue from legal downloads amounted to 5% of the current revenue from mobile phone ringtones.
If I was Apple I'd be selling ringtones on the ITMS.
Da Blog
Sony, seem to completely lose it when it comes to cell-phones (in Sony's case, they seem to be partnering with Ericson, so perhaps it's the latter's fault).
Well, Sony had fricking awfully designed mobile phones before they teamed up with Ericsson. Sony Ericsson is a really good example of a product merger gone the right way. Ericsson has all that AND a bag of chips when it comes to telecommunications and mobile phones, but theyr design was outdated since they didn't believe that anyone other than business people wanted to buy mobiles, so they got shafted by Nokias youth-inspired phones. Sony knows how to make something stylish and chuck it full of features. The result is, very cool. A phone that has the most features from Sony and takes a hard beating like a real Ericsson phone.
Apple should have teamed up with Sony Ericsson.