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Motorola Announces E1060 Phone With iTunes Support
amichalo writes "Topping today's earlier news that Nokia and MS are collaborating on digital music in a cell phone, Motorola announced the E1060, a cell phone available Q4 2005 that supports MPEG-4/WMV/WMA/MP3 formats. Interestingly, Motorola is not locking themselves into Apple's iTunes, but also support Real Player. Reuters has more."
No, no. Nokia is using Windows Media Player. Motorola is using iTunes software, so it supports DRM'd AAC as well as the other formats. :)
- oZ
// i am here.
Divergence makes sense because some people just want a phone that does the phone function well. I don't really care for carrying around a shitty camera. I don't use a PDA. I don't like music. I therefore bought me a Nokia 1100 phone. Dumb as a rock phone with BW screen no bluetooth etc. Small, cheap and lasts for a month on a single charge (my mileage). When I do carry a digital camera, I want pretty good photos and carry a real digital camera.
If you look at hunting knives, you'll see a wide spectrum of just-a-blade knives to Swiss Army (does everything, but not very well). I expect that phone vendors will continue to mnake just-a-phone, but the incremental addition of a MP3 player etc is getting cheaper and adds a bunch of functionality (as well as a way to sell services), so the richer feature set will continue to grow too.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
- Do we know what kind of removable memory it has? (What is TransFlash??)
TransFlash is a removable flash memory format designed by SanDisk specifically for Motorola at their request. It's used in about 3-5 Motorola phones now, I think, and absolutely nowhere else. It's thin enough and small enough that you could lose it and not even realize it's gone for weeks until you need it. It's about the size as my pinky fingernail, and almost as thin. It has absolutely no redeeming qualities aside from being so insanely small that Motorola can stick a slot into their phones and say they support removable media without actually allocating serious space for it. It's FAR less useful than SD or CF, the only worthwhile removable flash media format (IMHO).
Now, in their defense, Motorola assumes that most people will put one card in their phone and leave it forever, except maybe once or twice when they replace it with a bigger one and then leave that one in forever, like a hard drive. That's probably a valid assumption, but still having a proprietary format has all the associated problems with being proprietary (no competition so high prices, can't swap between devices, etc. etc. etc.)
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
Actually, Nokia has not locked itself into anything. Current models support MP3/WAV/AAC/AMR on the audio front and MPEG-4/H.263 on the video front, and Real formats as well.
The only value in this press release is the word "iTunes." Everything else has already been done by the competiton.
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
http://news.morningstar.com/news/BW/M10/D25/200410 25005359.html
"TransFlash continues to generate interest among other mobile phone makers as well, said Sabio. SanDisk expects approximately 40 handset models from several manufacturers to include TransFlash support in 2005."
The link above also has some details such as the exact size ... but yeah, pinky nail size is a pretty good size comparison. I don't know if the parent has ever actually used a device with Transflash regularly but they really aren't that difficult to handle and really aren't a proprietary format.
As far as I know all retail transflash cards come with a SD adapter, and I do happen to know for sure that the card is the exact same as a SD card except that the pins are in a slightly different order and it's a different package. (I made an adapter to allow my v710 to read from a 1gig transflash simply by soldering a SD card to the pins of a hollow TF body)
The parent however is correct that I hardly take mine out. I do so maybe only once every few weeks to throw an episode of sealab and some fresh mp3s on there. Its not one of those things you carry around with you (although it does have a nice little carrier that holds a TF card and the SD adapter (you can even carry around a second TF in the adapter).
How many people here would pay a one time fee of $25 to give their phone the ability to get free ring tones, watch full length movies and episodes of your favourite shows, mp3s, freely move pictures from a pc. (or $45 for 256mb)
What it comes down to is the functionality it adds to devices is more than worth what it costs (around $10 more than a same size SD from sandisk)
AND,
offers all the same features of a SD card ... plus making your phone kick ass I mean come on.