First Picture of new Motorola iTunes Phone?

swissfondue writes "macprime.ch. is reporting a link to a pdf presentation by Motorola's North Asia manager Michael Tatelman, VP and GM Mobile devices, made on 21 June 2005 to analysts of Morgan Stanley in Beijing. Page 15 of the presentation shows a picture of a yet unknown Motorola phone playing iTunes visualizer, with the usual Apple logo. The silhouette of the phone is not in RAZR style, but in PEBL. It seems to also be featuring a scroll wheel."

Comments

Kind of ugly IMO

[alvinrod]

That doesn't really look like any kind of phone that I'd want to be carrying around.

Perhaps this is Apple's answer to people saying cell phones are poised to serve as MP3 players and music downloading devices. Since Apple isn't in the mobile phone business, this might be a way to get their brand name out there even more and to keep some of their market dominance.

An iTunes phone would be great...

[Unloaded]

...but the carriers won't sell it because they all want the content piece of the revenue stream. They're convinced that they can get you to buy into a plan that has you downloading songs from their service, while they charge you airtime for browsing and downloading, on top of the price per song.

No thanks.

Re:An iTunes phone would be great...

[garcia]

They're convinced that they can get you to buy into a plan that has you downloading songs from their service, while they charge you airtime for browsing and downloading, on top of the price per song.

They're convinced because people do it. Ringtones, applications, and stupid games for mobile phones is a billion+ dollar a year industry.

For 30 second ringtones with crappy quality, T-mobile gets to charge $1.25+ each and people buy into it!

I'll be more worried when they realize that they could make even more money by charging you to put your phone on buzz.

Re:An iTunes phone would be great...

[MouseR]

Anyone who purchases a song via a phone, given carrier restrictions & fees, ought to be aligned against a wall ans slapped (or microwaved).

But the point of this phone is to merge your phone and music device in one. As a die-hard Mac fan as I can be, I still dont own an iPod because I feel the product lacks features. I mean, it's a portable drive that plays music. Oh wait, you can *view* contacts and limited calendar entries, buut that's it. My phone does all that, better, minus the music playback and disk mode.

Given this "iPhone" can sync with a Mac (and a peesea) and work in disk mode, I have an iPod Shuffle -class player PLUS color screen and the full gadgetry of a typical cell phone.

presumably (given the latest release), synching will be handled through iTunes ratter than iSync, wich makes some sense given iTines is available on both Macs and peeseas.

Show me this iPhone thing and I'm an instant buyer (and will have a phone to sell), regardless of who makes it.

Re:An iTunes phone would be great...

[bonehead]

Simple, they have the hardware manufacturer include a "feature" to notify the network whenever vibrate mode is enabled, then bill you accordingly.

Considering the degree to which the carriers have managed to get Bluetooth (a hardware feature) crippled, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine them getting the manufacturers to add this functionality to the hardware.

Re:An iTunes phone would be great...

[Overzeetop]

My Motorola 810 has the ability to synch with my computer via software from Motorola. Alsthough certain models allow the trasnfer of multimedeia, it is a disabled function on the v810. Why? According to Motorola, the vendor (US Cellular) requested that the data be unavailable so that all photos taken and any multimedeia apps be transferred through their EasyEdge(tm) service.

I have a camera phone which can take pictures, but which cannot send them anywhere to be viewed/transferred/printed without a $0.25/image fee, in addition to the $5.95 per month EasyEdge service fee. All because US Cellular is greedy.

Microsoft's Prediction...

[LegendOfLink]

Didn't Bill Gates predict the fall of the iPod with an MP3-enabled phone?

Looks like Apple is going to beat them to the punch once again.

Pricing...

[Arthur B.]

I thought they did not want to do that because full songs are currently charged $1 on itune and shitty excerpts are currently being charged >$3 on cell phones...

Looks real but...

[RavenChild]

All it might be is a phone with a circle drawn and a vis from iTunes slapped onto the screen. Also notice the placement on the keypad, it lacks numbers and also the placement of the wheel might hinder the use of the keys.

What happened to basic phones?

[strongmace]

I know I, my family, and many of my friends, do not need these super tricked out phones. We do not need games, dozens of ringtones, video playback, cameras, or mp3 players in our phones.

All we need is a very basic phone, that has a phone book, maybe voice activated dialing, and voicemail.

It is getting pretty difficult to find basic cell phones as it is. All the vendors try to press all these phones with extra features that I will never use. Damnit, I dont need my phone to be able to play mp3s. /me grumbles

Re:What happened to basic phones?

[GauteL]

For every news story about a new mobile phone:

1. Complain that there is no more basic phones
2. Get moderated +4 Insightful
3. Profit!

Come on, this is the same thing every bleeding time a new phone is announced. Get over it already.

The fact is that it is cheaper for the manufacturers to make a limited selection of models at the same time.

Features sell phones, so the minimum number of features will always go up.

For every 1 user that only needs a phone book and voicemail, there is probably 20 that also wants polyphonic ringtones, 10 that wants a colour display and a 100 users that also need text messaging.

It does not make sense to make every single combination of these phones, so you will either have a phone that is underfeatured or overfeatured.

If it is underfeatured you will have lost most of your customers. If it is overfeatured the people that need less will still buy it.

Re:What happened to basic phones?

[argent]

Most phone makers to a "basic" phone

The LG phone I've got is about the most basic one on the list the carrier offered for our area. It's too damn fancy and complex and even if you don't USE the features you're still paying for them in reduced battery life.

go with the ~£25 Nokia 1100.

Oh, a pom.

That explains everything. Look, sunshine, you're in bloody cellphone heaven. Here in the US it's like the third world, except the third bloody world generally has better cellphone service than the US. You don't get a choice of phones when you sign up, you don't usually get to buy a phone and use it with your service because everyone's phones are locked... and not what you guys think of as locked either: there's like four different cellular protocols and most of them don't have any concept of phone portability like GSM does.

So people who are frustrated by crappy cellphones, they probably don't have any of the options you're talking about. Even PAYG isn't PAYG as you know it.

Re:What happened to basic phones?

[argent]

For every 1 user that only needs a phone book and voicemail, there is probably 20 that also wants polyphonic ringtones, 10 that wants a colour display and a 100 users that also need text messaging.

You have the numbers backwards.

For every 1 user that needs polyphonic ringtones or a a color display, there's 10 who just want a bloody phone. And EVERYONE benefits from longer battery life.

Text messaging? That's just software. You don't need to build a fancy phone to get text. OK, OK, you can't get text on a 7 segment LED, but that's a bit primitive even for us puritans.

Re:Public Danger...

[pahles]

Great. Now people will be able to talk and listen to music while driving....

I've always been able to talk while driving. Listening to music isn't that difficult to, just turn on the car stereo.

Not even sure it's that

[Mr. Underbridge]

That's a shitty looking phone that someone cut and pasted a screenshot onto in photoshop for a corporate presentation.

Considering the presentation didn't focus on that at all, or bring any attention to it, I might even believe this is a hoax.

It's scary that this is all it takes to get a mac rumour going.

Sadly, this is actually more evidence than usual for a mac rumor.

Re:Not even sure it's that

[badasscat]

If it's a fake, it's a pretty impressive one from what I can see.

It is almost certainly a fake and it is not very impressive from my point of view.

The strongest evidence of a fake is that all of the graphics in this presentation are raster, except for this phone, which appears to be vector. Does that make any sense to you? No, not to me either. It's almost as if Motorola would have used one source for all of their images and then a second source for just the image of this phone. Now, you can assume that there'd be some back and forth with Apple or possibly even an outside design agency over this phone, but that still wouldn't explain why this one graphic is in a completely different format than all the others.

Second, this phone is not a PEBL. The PEBL is a specific model, as is the RAZR. Yet it appears under the heading of "PEBL".

Third, the design of the phone itself doesn't make any visual sense. Look at it. It's simply a candybar phone that somebody has Photoshopped an ugly green wheel directly on top of. If we're to believe this, there are actually buttons under the scroll wheel.

Lastly, does this thing look like anything Apple would actually sanction? I mean, seriously. Use your critical thinking skills. Apple has some very rigorous standards for their branding, and they only allow their logos to appear on products that they have approved. Something this big, I can't imagine Steve Jobs himself not being personally involved with. And this does not look like anything either Apple or Jobs would ever allow out there. Not just because it's ugly (though there is that), but it just looks so completely different from their design ethos. Apple is not going to have their first iTunes phone be a mini-Xbox.

I have no doubt this was a real presentation, but this image was not originally part of it, and it is not a real Motorola phone. If I'm wrong, I will eat my hat.

Looks fake, but...

[Iriel]

While the PR from Motorola on this makes it look like nothing but hype for Motorola, it would be an interesting concept to take a stab at. However, M$ plans on making phones that will kill off the iPod, and while I don't think this will happen, a good enough media phone could kill the Shuffle. If Apple plays this right, they could outdate their own shuffle with an enhanced capacity iTunes phone, and destroy Micro$oft's dream at the same time.

Re:A scroll wheel?

[mrchaotica]

Hey, don't knock it -- that might actually work better, since a lot of calls are made by scrolling through an address book instead of punching in numbers.

Plus, it'd be cool. : D

Re:Famous sayings?

[fanblade]

Well, technically he's got a way out. This isn't an iPod. It's a cell phone that sports a mobile version of iTunes (iPods don't run iTunes).

Re:Talk about a stretch....

[Concerned Onlooker]

It's scary that this is all it takes to get a mac rumour going.

Maybe. But perhaps it's just sad that Microsoft users don't get nearly as excited by the latest offerings from Redmond. Apple delivers cool stuff and people get excited about that.

Re:More famous sayings...

[timster]

I don't know that it's obvious that anyone ever really said it, but Bill Gates certainly didn't play any significant role in determining it.

What was likely said, and by an IBM engineer, was something along the lines of "a 1MB address space ought to be enough for this personal computer." Keep in mind that the PC was not intended as an architecture that would take over the world and still be around in 25 years. That happened purely by accident.

The 640K limit for base RAM was a simple consequence of the choice of processor, as the Intel 8086 is limited to a 1MB addressing bus. IBM presumably chose that particular chip because it was reasonably inexpensive and comparable with the CPUs of other personal computers of its day.

It was much later when Bill Gates came to be a symbol of the PC revolution, and as the most vocal proponent of the PC, it was natural for people to think of him when they encountered its most frustrating limitations. So I can believe him when he says he didn't say it.