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Major Hangups Over the iPod Phone
chadwick writes "It seemed like a sure thing: the iPod mobile phone. What could be more irresistible than a device combining the digital-music prowess of Apple Computer (AAPL) with the wireless expertise of Motorola (MOT)? Motorola sent its buzz machinery into overdrive in January when it leaked word that the product would debut at a cellular-industry conference in New Orleans in mid-March. Well, hold the phone. At the New Orleans confab, a frustrated Edward Zander, Motorola's chief executive, stood before a roomful of analysts and reporters and said the handset's debut would have to wait. "
Nobody gets hurt...
But it is of course dishonest to both your customers and shareholders. For companies that want to build quality relationships with their customers, this is bad policy. You've heard of vaporware? Yeah, that's what your customers begin to expect and why companies like Microsoft, HP (under Carly) and others have lost the respect of many of their customers. Concept products are one thing, in that they are designed to get a feeling for how your customer base would react to such a product, but there is no expectation of that concept being actually produced in its current form. Pre-announcing is simply dishonest.
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The problem isnt the feature rich phone, the problem is carriers have some how got people to pay $1-4 for STUPID RINGTONES!!!! Itunes charges me $1 for a song whether its 1 min or 10 min, but a 3 second repeating ringtone costs me $2 or a 12 kbps 30 seconds clip of a song cost me $4...wtf is all I can say.
The phone companies wont let people do what we want with our phones until we stop letting them rape our wallets! $1.50 for a 32x32 pixel background image! Why cant i just send myself a custom made BG for free? Easy because stupid people pay, and they keep paying.
Change wont take long, if we all stopped buying ringtones and bullshit for our phones then change would happen pretty quick, its a broken buisness model made to screw the customers out of even more money, dont fall for it!
It was idiotic even trying to launch this thing in the USA. Carriers have a strange-hold over this market. Nokia has a range over over 100 handsets - you can buy about 6 of these on US carrier contracts, not including decent phones with WLAN and Bluetooth.
I cannot understand why Apple is sodding around with Motorola on this. They should have partnered with Nokia.
As an aside, Apple should also partner with Shazam. The best thing that an iPod/phone combo could do is recognize music from an online database and buy it for you.
I see nothing but dark clouds in the future of cell phones in America unless we take back control from the corporations. We must divorce the hardware from the service, just like we did for wired telephone service. You should be able to buy whatever phone YOU want, with whatever feature set YOU want, and connect to whatever carrier YOU want. Verizon in particular has already shown us exactly how they want to control us.
Last I checked, apple pays 60c per song and resells them for 99c. That is approximately a 40% margin.
Where did you check? Because the numbers I have (as a shareholder) reveal that margins are closer to 6%. Analysts such as Piper Jaffray estimate its anywhere from %5 to 10% and some analysts have suggested that Apple has actually lost some money in the first year on iTunes.
You obviously have no concept of margins in e-commerce. Otherwise you wouldn't be saying that.
My investment portfolio says otherwise.
Next time try to make your argument stick in real world scenerios......
What is it that we are talking about here? In case you did not know, the iTMS is a real world investment.
rather than make believe BS you want to spout off to try to look smart
I'll let the Ph.D. and my publications speak to that. Look, there is no need to be rude on this forum as there are many here that are trying to keep Slashdot an informative place to go. What exactly is it that you are trying to say?
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A device combining the digital music prowess of Apple, the user interface design of Apple, the build quality of Apple, and the wireless expertise of Nokia.
Frankly, Motorola's user interface is a hideous piece of crap that doesn't seem to have improved since the 80s: menus that SHOUT AT YOU, and a phone book that still can't cope with people having more than one phone number (duh!). No matter how good the RAZR looks, it's the same craptastic software on it, and that's why I'm not gonna touch it.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak