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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."
Is it just me or has motorola really made a come back with their industrial design? This unit looks great!
Some initial questions:
- Is there any word on what the iTunes interface looks like?
- Do we know what kind of removable memory it has? (What is TransFlash??)
- Will it DRM the music files so you can't transfer them back over bluetooth (is it a one-way sync?)
- Is the Bluetooth 2.0?
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
I must be a dying breed... I want my phone to make calls with, I want my iPod to listen to music too, and now you guys are blurring the lines again... Stop it... I can see it now... in a year, I'll have an iPod that does PDA stuff, plays music, is a cell phone, has a 10 megapixel camera in it, and opens my garage door.
Why can't I have a phone that just works as a phone... and an Mp3 player that just plays music, nothing else? I thought apple was going in the right direction with the shuffle... it's small, and does just one thing... play music... is that too much to ask of phones?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
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.
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.
Why do they keep putting the features of $comment{device1} into $comment{device2}? I just want my $comment{device1} to do $comment{device1_function}. Next thing you know, my $comment[25]{simple_device} will have $comment[25]{outrageous_feature}.
The way to make money with music-enabled cell phones is this.
1) Make sure you can sync with your computer (e.g., iTunes)
2) Keep the airtime charge for download low (music biz to subsidize?)
3) Work with the radio stations so that when they play a new release they can also say, "And dial *1592 with your iTunes phone to buy and download this song now"
Instant gratification + low end user cost = profit
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.
/.'s ability to predict the next hot consumer toy is nothing I'd bet the farm on... ;-)
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
No one will buy it. No one is going to buy the Nokia/Microsoft thing either. Just like no one bought the Nokia N-Gage. People don't want this sort of thing.
The thing to remember about "convergence" devices is they only make sense if you can perform both functions without either interfering with the other. Let's say someone sells something that is both a video game system and a DVD player. This is a good idea. There is no interference, and the parts compliment the whole nicely; a DVD player needs some kind of MPEG decoder, a video game system needs some kind of optical drive, but the two never interfere-- you will never want to use your DVD player and video game system at the same time. Now let's say someone sells something that is both a video game system and a PVR. It will not sell. True, a hard drive and certain other features are desirable in both video games and PVRs. There is massive interference, though; you very much want to use both of these products at the same time. You want to be able to sit there and play GTA all night without worrying that you're missing Family Guy, because the Tivo will just pick it up. The engineer must thus either duplicate so much hardware that there is little or no benefit to the convergence, or just dictate "you can't use the pvr and video game features at once". (Your PC, of course, can act as both a PVR and a video game system without significant interference! But there you're trading functionality for convenience, ease of use, focus and cost. Someone could try to slap together a PC that plugs into a TV and say "look! it's a pvr and video game system!"... but they'll probably be as hard to use and charge as much as if you'd just bought a small PC.)
Now, let's think: What if someone tries to put an mp3 player in a phone? Even worse idea. The parts compliment each other poorly; you do not want or need the kind of playback quality on a phone that you need in an mp3 player, you do not want or need the kind of disk storage in a phone that you need in an mp3 player (unless you have the ability to record and save phone calls or ambient noise, which is a kickass potential feature, but unlikely due to legality). Meanwhile, there's interference. You want to be able to pause your mp3 player to answer your phone without losing your place; you want to be able to run your mp3 player all night without your phone battery being dead in the morning. The two features subtly, but distinctly, struggle for the hardware. Maybe if Apple is building the thing they can reconcile the two. If Motrorola designs it... probably not so much.
Basically the only benefit here is that unlike with PVRs or video game systems, people have shown themselves ready and willing in large quantities to pay too much for mp3 players and phones. OK... wait, actually that's a pretty good benefit, since people have demonstrated they're willing to pay more for a "luxury" product with the iPod name, and if this is a high-margin product it will make decent profit even if very few people buy one. Um, I might have just seriously damaged my own argument. But, you get the idea.
Someday a PDA, a video game system, a phone, and an mp3 player may all converge in a single cost-effective, battery-efficient device. Until that day it is unlikely consumers will bite on a product that is more than one, but not all of these.
(Note: If you object to anything above, pretend I prepended it with "In my opinion...)
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Quick! Grab your umbrella! There's about to be a flood of crotchedy old techies who think mobile phones that serve more than one purpose are crazy! Crrraaazaaay!!
Seriously though, I'm not the only one who WANTS to see the day where we have a phone, iPod, and PDA all in one device... right? Sure, bring on the "jack-of-all-trades master-of-none" arguement... but carrying around one device that does it all is better than having multiple gadgets. So what if the current creations need a little more R&D... it's not like basic phones can't be purchased anymore.
I, for one, welcome the chance to have an MP3 player on my phone. Why? Because I don't want to carry 4 portable devices. 1 phone, 1 camera, 1 MP3 player, and one palm pilot. That's effectively what I want and it's what the Treo 600 and 650 give me. Well actually no, I don't really want the camera, but I can't get a high end phone these days without it so I'll deal for now.
Frankly, I'm going to spend the money on the phone, and I like having a portable entertainment and workstation on my hip at all times, which is what it is. I can take care of simple work tasks just from that phone, and i can entertain myself very easily while waiting or traveling. The Mp3 player doesn't store that many songs and i need a memory card, but hell I don't carry with me that many Mp3s! I'm never going to fill up a 10,000 song player... or even a 1,000 song one.
Just because you don't want one doesn't mean other people don't. So far the only thing I don't like about those phones are the cameras. Everything else does in fact work great.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
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.
You call your buddy with an iTunes phone and are put on hold. What do you hear? How about something from Schubert? Someone calls you, and what do you hear? Why not Snoop Dog?
I believe the benefits conferred by this feature will be more than cancelled out by the resulting conspicuously high murder rate among users of the feature.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Go down to your local mall and its food court. Take a look at the teenagers down there and what they are doing. There has become a huge culture built around cell phones -- talking (of course), text messaging, picture mail, wallpaper, and especially ring tones. I've seen primetime TV ads lately for companies selling animated cell phone wallpaper. It's big business. The iPod, as amazingly popular as it is, is just starting to become a fixture of youth culture. So there just might be some serious money to be made in the convergence.
I am the target audience. I bought an 1G iPod within 4 months of its release, I switch cell phones and providers every year to take advantage of the rebates, and my Mac is indispensible to me due to the synchronization of my calendar and contacts via iSync over Bluetooth to whatever cellphone is flavor-of-the-year.
And this phone will almost definitely become my next pick: my 1G iPod just died (not of battery issues -- I replaced that with a Newer Tech high capacity unit a while ago), my phone contract only has a few months left on it, and this advice would therefore let me slim down my pockets by cutting a theoretical iPod Shuffle out of the loop.
With so many phones on the market -- just browse through the US, GSM Nokia lineup sometime if you want to make your head spin -- there needs to be differentiation. All phones are reasonably small, and smaller yet is not worth $400 to me. All phones that I'd consider use Bluetooth and furthermore have adequate to excellent RF reception for all the neo-Luddites out there clamoring for "just a phone. sheesh". iTunes syncing is just the ticket for those like me on the fence.
Yes, but I like those features fine.
I want a big one.
Nobody makes a phone big enough for me anymore. i want a phone that extends from my ear to my mouth, and can rest comfortably on my shoulder. I'm not interested in putting it in my pocket, I'll clip it to my belt, thanks. But I'm sick of small telephones.
Oh, and one more little feature that I want - GOOD VOICE QUALITY. I can almost live without big for that one.