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."
Not quite sure how this would be an ipod killer. It only has 32mb of internal memory and supports up to 512mb of additional memory. I can't really see cellphone/mp3 player combo devices really taking off until they start to have storage capabilities similar to an ipod mini.
That being said, I'm not sure I see downloadable music on your cellphone EVER taking off because once you've got tons of storage (and tons of your music) why would you spend the time (or money) downloading more through your phone. Where I think a device like this could become popular is if service providers offered streaming radio. This seems much more possible now with 3g networks taking off.
I think when you're trying to keep prices up and keep sales volume up, yes it might be too much to ask. I agree though, it's harder and harder to find a decent mobile phone that works well as a phone, first and foremost. Often you have to buy some super-fancy decked out version just to get a decent phone, but pay a huge premium for 45 features you don't want or need. Well, here's your market opening... get out the soldering gun.