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Sony Ericsson Announces First Walkman Phone
jonknee writes "Sony Ericsson has announced the first in a new line of self-described "Walkman phones" that specialize in playing music. The W800i features a 512MB memory card to store tunes and up to 30 hours of playback (if you keep the phone off, otherwise about half that). We should see a Motorola phone with iTunes onboard within the next two weeks, making March the month of music phones."
how many?
1.
that's the point of all in one.
that being said, this thing is pretty lame featurewise. phones have had mp3 players for ages.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Lessee, it's a Sony digital music format, so it'll be all fucked up. 1. Memory Stick? Give me a break. 2. I'm sure that I can't just put a FAT formatted flash card in it. I'm sure that I have to use some sort of fucking evil-ass Sony piece of crap, PC-only software for the sole purpose of COPYING FILES TO A FLASH CARD.
'Single Point of Failure' comes to mind. I.e. it does everything for you and either dies or the battery runs out and your alone in the Wilderness of the Non-Conntected. Like those goofy cartoons from years ago that said things like, "The computers all were down today so we had to think." But more like, you do without the luxuries and have to borrow cell phones or find rapidly vanishing (in the UK anyway) public phones.
Or worse, all your stuff is on the phone and some weasel breaks in and copies it all and leaves you a message like "I'm Sorry Bitch"
Unconnected and lovin' it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It should be, but my PDA thinks it's a music player and my phone thinks it's my calendar and my iPod thinks it should be my contacts list.
And none of them do them well.
I either want a single device which does them all well, or my devices to do one thing and do that well. I would be quite content if my phone didn't try to offer me a bigger penis in between serving up music...
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Combining the functionality of a phone, camera, pda, and Walkman into one is certainly doable technically (many of the components are common - battery, screen, processor, radio transciever). The hard part will be keeping it comprehensible, and making each part work well. My Sony Clie has all but the phone, and I can tell you the software needs a lot of work.
I sure hope they don't stop reinventing this "convergence device" wheel until they get it right.
Problem is sir, the SD is also proprietary. SD is controlled by Matsushita, Toshiba, and Sandisk. MMC isn't proprietary, but by default pretty much all new MMC slots pretty much needs SD compatibility since consumers don't know the diffrence and expect SDs to work.
Why would Sony dump one proprietary standard just to adopt another which they have to pay licencing fees for? Quite honestly, the Sony-bashing regarding memorysticks is garbage. It would be a valid argument if the alternative was an open standard, however most people seem to endorse SDs. Out of all the pletohra of the small flash multimedia standards that constantly pop up I'm not sure why people only attack Sony.
As far as DRM goes, all other players also have DRM. plus it supports MP3s, so there's a way around it. Also, the phone is GSM/GPRS triband so it will likely work with other GSM services in the future.