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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."
if you get put on hold you can listen to your own music instead of theirs?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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.
...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.
"I will never combine an iPod with a cell phone" - Steve Jobs.
"There will never be unions in my plants" - Henry Ford.
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.
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
Engadget reported the same thing yesterday with a pic and it's even in English.
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How to rob an Apple fanboi.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
It's also on AppleInsider.
--
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So... in other words it's... a rotary phone?
:O
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
>> Wait, how do I dial a phone that only has one butan?
Don't worry. It's a special Apple BUTAN. All you have to do is to hold down the button and think of the person you are dialing. The BUTAN does it for you. All bow to the BUTAN!
Free XBox, PS2
In the middle of the presentation there's a slide titled "Changing the Game in Candy Bars" with some cool phones in the background.
These are some really hot products. I wish I had these guys on-board last time I did a demo to a client! But I wonder if cell phones are the new candy bars for geeks?
Candy bars, I would guess, are a fairly stable commodity. A Mars bar last year is going to be the same as this year. Eye candy, sure, but not candy bars.
Will all that consumer production value, it makes you wonder how much these companies actually pay product designers to keep new stuff churning out. There's got to be a lot of money in that business. Everybody's getting into it.
Love Boat Meets Santa's Workshop?
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.
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.
/me grumbles
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.
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." -Zapp Brannigan
Does no one at Motorola have spell check turned on?
...linking a 6+MB PDF directly. Then posting on the homepage.
:P
Really, have some compassion Slashdot.
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.
Sig?
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.
But Motorola will making the phone, won't that make it a BUTN?
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
Now they actually have to superimpose them on top of each other (note how the scroll pad intersects the number keys)- Don't these designers understand that this is a horrible design?
It's so obvious what to do: The scroll wheel is great for picking songs and numbers to call out of the address book- For numbers, just use voice recognition: Having a recognizer just for digits works fantastically already- Heck, they wouldn't even have to do the recognition in the handset, but use a central server to handle that part, if it requires too many computrons!
For crissakes, the whole point of the scroll pad is that it is a versatile input device- The scroll pad is all you need!
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.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
Does it accept Morse code? :)
Ya know, when I see incredibly dumb Apple topics like this one, this article immediately springs to mind:
iProduct.
Look closely though at the two handsets and they are both a very similar layout, apart from the "rotator blob" on the new picture which seems to clash with the keypad.
The "E790" pictured is basically the E390/E398 platform that has been remixed onto several different handsets already.
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Here is a Link to a screenshot of page 15 w/ a photo of the phone.
Mod me however you feel, I don't care.
http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/90/ 90829/presentations/062105PresentationtoMorganStan leyAnalystsinBeijingTatelman.pdf/
We had to move it due to missing akamai :)
Snopes doesn't even have a 'true' or 'false' on it... perhaps that'd be a good project for them?
notice the difference? PEBL looks more like a traditional phone than the RAZR StarTREK communicator .but. PEBL is without any signposts from the past.
No buttons, no dials... PEBL isn't built on the communicator paradigm. US Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the Internet is not a "communications carrier" subject to FCC regs but instead an "information carrier".
PEBL looks like it skirts the babyBells battle for button pushers, entirely. PEBL will be defined by its software functions and information *abilities* in the vein of RIM's Blackberry. Like Blackberry it will also have a phone but not nearly the quality or functionality of phone as offered by the mainstream Bells.
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.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
>> Wait, how do I dial a phone that only has one butan?
Hmmm... if only there were a way for a phone to choose a number using only a dial.