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Apple To Unveil iPod Cellphone Next Week?
Mictian writes "Apple Computer is planning to hold a major press conference next week (September 7th) in San Francisco and the rumours say that it will be the unveiling of a new iPod cellphone (NYT). The phone would incorporate the popular iTunes software, be built by Motorola and marketed by Cingular Wireless. The companies have declined to confirm or deny the report, which would fit Apple's past pattern of being secretive to maximise the splash on announcement day."
Nice, but apparently it'll only hold 100 songs. And if that is true, it is not nearly enough capacity to make me switch from carrying both an MP3 player and a mobile.
Why Cingular?
First, they sell Motorola phones, and Motorola partnered with Apple to build it. Also, they're a GSM carrier, and they seem to sell bleeding edge phones a little bit quicker than other carriers. Motorola probably built the first version as GSM because more carriers use that protocol. I love Verizon, but ditched 'em for Cingular because Cingular gets cooler phones faster. Granted, the coverage isn't as good, but hey, geeks love toys.
What's your damage, Heather?
Because Cingular is the largest US provider that uses GSM - a world-wide standard. Since most high-end Motorola phones are quad-band GSM they can be sold anywhere in the world. Cingular is probably the first US carrier - and international partners are surely to follow very soon.
A phone for Verizon or Spring is mostly worthless outside US.
Technologically, US is behind most other markets anyway so I would expect Motorola to sell more of these in Europe.
Also, Motorola has been known to do "exclusive" deals with Cingular (ie, Razr v3).
http://www.misterbg.org/AppleProductCycle/
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
Nokia used to own half the world's commercial forrests, so their no stranger to reinventing their corporate image
T-Mobile has unlimited data for $20/month. Good luck getting a signal, though.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Maybe apple insisted on a click wheel with numbers in it (like touch button rotary... :) )
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000887049175/ mod up and share, cheers
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
V3 - great phone, absolutely DIRE interface. Really, Microsoft would have done a better job on their UI (and they would have done, their phones are at least more usable). Crap predictive text (uses a last used algorithm, not most commonly used, so "IF" and "HE" get swapped round at random. Totally dire address book (won't display number when you're entering a text, so you don't know if a name refers to a landline, mobile, or work line), can only search address book based on first character (nice one motorola). And to top it all off, completely mis-leading dialogs - for example, if someone calls whilst you're in the middle of retreiving a message, you can't terminate the call to the answering service by hitting end call - because that terminates the call you haven't answered! Seriously, if you think the V3 is a good phone, you need to try more phones!
64kbps is the technical limit of vanilla GPRS. However, T-Mobile is pretty far along with their EDGE rollout in most metro areas - here in Atlanta I have to go outside the perimeter before I lose EDGE coverage. Real-world transfer rates are in the 80-100kbps range almost everywhere I've checked where I have more than one bar. Check this forum for user's reports.
AFAIK T-Mobile is waiting for the deployment to be completed before they begin marketing the service, but there's not going to be any additional charges for it beyond what they charge for GPRS today. They have just begun to sell the v330, which has EDGE support (I use an unlocked v551).
As far as T-Mobile's coverage, I will note that the higher-frequency band (they're on 1800 or 1900MHz in the US, Cingular uses 850) does cause the signal to drop out sooner inside buildings than Cingular's - for some reason it happens a lot in supermarkets - due to faster attenuation of higher-frequency signals. But other than that, I don't have problems in metro areas. Rural/suburban areas are a different story, I've heard...
Wonderkid wrote:
a) A video iPod, yet sales of portable video devices have not taken off, unlike MP3 players before the iPod was first launched.
There were [meaningful] MP3 player sales before the iPod? Really? Where? Who had them?
The cell phone / mobile phone networks are in a mess and not global, while WiFi is a global standard.
Say it with me: regulations, regulations, regulations. Cell phone networks are a mess and non-global because most countries strictly control which radio frequencies are available to telecom carriers for mobile communications, and many countries license incompatible frequencies. Take something as simple as GSM, for instance. In the United States, GSM is licensed in the 850MHz and 1900MHz bands, while in most of Europe, it's licensed in the 900MHz and 1800MHz bands. Mobile carriers have no control over this: it's the government regulators' decisions. Geographic problems affect network technology also. The U.S. has GSM and CDMA as its major digital technologies; parts of Asia are strongly CDMA, while Europe, Africa, and the Middle East are GSM.
It also isn't true to say that "WiFi is a global standard." Even with WiFi, some areas of the world (think Japan) regulate some of the bands that WiFi occupies differently than other countries. What is true of WiFi is that there isn't a [strong] competing wireless network technology alongside it, e.g. there isn't the CDMA/GSM division in WiFi. That is, until WiMax takes off.
The future lies in VoIP.
Maybe, but that's a more distant future than the next 3-5 years. Decent VoIP transmission requires significant bandwidth; this rules out the cellular network de facto for the next few years. VoIP over WiFi requires something that WiFi lacks: meaningful QoS. Know why you don't see business switching to wireless VoIP by the truckload? QoS. Even without the QoS problem, there are plenty of other still-present deficiencies in WiFi that make it currently unsuitable for VoIP. Security is one of them; we just this year finally got a good, workable, robust wireless security paradigm in the form of 802.11i. So far, I've seen zero wireless VoIP handsets that support WPA2. Most companies won't trust their voice communications to WEP, and rightly so. Conservative estimates give 3 years before 802.11i and its affiliated technologies really bunker down and start to take root.
Syncing with any Mac or PC would be wireless too which would be sweet.
Everybody keeps complaining to Apple about not having any wireless options in the iPod. Well, there's a good reason they don't: speed. It takes 10-15 minutes to fill my 4G iPod mini over FireWire; that's with FireWire's 400Mbps non-peak-throughput speeds. Bluetooth 1.x crawls along at about 1Mbps in really good conditions. The best WiFi we have is the 125Mbps "Super G", although actual throughput is only 30-45Mbps at best. Now, let's say that instead of a 4G iPod mini, I have a 60G iPod with color display. How long is it going to take me to fill up my 60G iPod over my 125Mbps WiFi connection? Long enough for me to decide it's not worth it.
Consider that a music playing PHONE is not original
It's not done really well by anybody yet, in the same way that MP3 wasn't done well by anybody before the iPod (and with the exception of the iPod, still isn't). Sure, many people can "figure out" the current MP3 phones after significant hassle, in the same way many people could "figure out" the early Rios and Nomads, but like the MP3 player market, sales have shown that when it comes to portable entertainment, the public does not want to be hassled. If you disagree, Apple has a US$4B yearly iPod business for you to argue with.
perhaps with a 2MP digicam on the back too.
Apple [fortunately] only does technology that it knows it can do really well. Cameras consist of a lot more than a plastic lens and an OEMed CCD. Apple is very unlikely to get [back] into cameras; there's more in cameras than they know about, and anyway, just about everybody already has a decent (e.g. >2MP) digital camera, plus three or four others in their cell phones, PDAs, shoes, etc. The iPod really doesn't need a camera.