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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.
Apple is releasing an iPod cell phone, while Nokia is releasing a tablet computer with no cell phone capabilities.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Now I can watch movie clips, read news AND listen to music using my mobile phone. However, every second voice conversation will still run to the lines of "Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Is this better? Yes? OK...wait, I've lost you. Can you hear me? CAN YOU? I'll call you back. I'LL CALL YOU BACK".
Fix your damned voice communications before you introduce more junk into handsets. I have a perfectly good MP3 player, but I still lack a useful phone!
maybe FINALLY apple will be taking advantage of the fact that they have ownership of iphone.org ( http://samspade.org/t/whois?a=iphone.org&server=au to&_charset_=UTF-8&btnGo=Whois )
-- hytmal
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?
It's not really a matter of new technology, but rather a matter of branding. The Apple iTunes name sells. This behavior is being done by many corporations. Virgin started it along with 7-eleven. Next to appear on the scene is Disney Mobile (not making this up). Names sell, so individuals who are dedicated to Apple and it's products will most likley purchase this type of phone/service.
A bunch of Tech Stuff
but I'm sure it won't fare nearly as well as the iPod itself. People get tired of their cell phones after a while. Especially when something new and flashy comes out.
Gadgets really shouldn't require contracts.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Looks like this ROKR phone is kinda the 2nd Generation iPod Shuffle.
- It is a small unit with minila but reasonable capacity via Flash
- Smaller than a pack of gum, more like a piece of gum stuck to your cell phone
- Now Suffle detractors get their screen and basically a free ride on the battery life of a much larger capacity battery too
- Still priced at a minimal premium
I have also read that the software people have seen is a music player only, not iTMS integration for buying tracks, so this will sync with
- iTunes
- Address Book
- Calendar events?
- To Dos?
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
...if it had 40 GB capacity would I buy this. Then I would be stuck forever with this cellphone (which, for all I know, could be crappy) and I wouldn't buy a new one even if this got old because I would already have a half-decent cellphone I'd have to carry around with me because it's also my mp3 player.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Wireless.
More space than a nomad.
Sweet.
Quote: 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.
Should read:
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, and sue everybody who brings out the real news for being correct and taking away the spotlight of apple.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
The advertisement for the event reads: "1,000 songs in your pocket changed everything... Here we go again". Do you really think that Apple would release a phone that holds 100 songs? My bet is a video iPod and iTunes 5 that will provide music video and movie content through the iTunes Music Store.
I'm so glad I ignored all of Verizon's "special offers," tempting me to renew my contract that will expire in a month.
If Apple/Motorola do release an iPod phone, and it's good, I'll ditch Verizon in a heartbeat. And I'll send them a letter telling them how much I resent their effort to control what kind of tecnology they'll allow on their network. They want to gouge me for songs the way they gouge you for ringtones. Screw that!
First, they sell Motorola phones, and Motorola partnered with Apple to build it.
I contend that Apple partnered with Cingular because they are the largest carrier in the US, now that they merged with AT&T, and because Cingular would allow Apple to sell a phone that didn't get it music by buying from an over priced Verizon music store. Sprint, Verizon, etc sell Motorola phones too (yeah, Sprint only sells CDMA Motos) but the GSM carriers will sell whatever they think is gonna bring in the customers.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Just need to add a PDA, WiFi, 80GB removable HD, 6MP camera w/video, DVR, GPS, and a tissue dispenser... then, "hook it to my veins!"
iTones.
1. There is all this speculation over a) A video iPod, yet sales of portable video devices have not taken off, unlike MP3 players before the iPod was first launched. b) An iTunes equipped phone. 2. Here are some things to think about: a) The cell phone / mobile phone networks are in a mess and not global, while WiFi is a global standard. b) The future lies in VoIP. c) The iPod OS contains an address book and a huge hard drive. Therefore, 3. An iPod with built in WiFi would be a global carrier free product and liberate people from the need to use a Mac or PC to purchase/download/sync their tunes and other data, they would simply login to the nearest WiFi network. Syncing with any Mac or PC would be wireless too which would be sweet. 4. Consider that a music playing PHONE is not original, the excellent Sony Ericsson K750i and K800 phones already do this well - and include well reviewed 2MP cameras too. (See http://www.fonebox.com/matrix ) 5. I vote for a wireless iPod as being what Apple SHOULD do, perhaps with a 2MP digicam on the back too.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
They won't say anything -> it must be true?
I hope you're not a stock broker.
I heard the new Apple product would be "revolutionary" and completely new, changing live as we know it and such... a mobile phone/iPod comination will NOT be that.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Imagine some idiot having ~500 minutes worth of ringtones!
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).
Plus, by issuing a GSM phone, Apple is open to pretty much the whole world on one phone platform. CDMA is pretty much US only and companies like Verizon, while supporting tech like Bluetooth, only support it in a crippled version that they can fee their customers to death with.
http://www.misterbg.org/AppleProductCycle/
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
Apple will also be announcing a flying car, the cure for cancer and Duke Nukem Forever.
Unfortunately, there is no evidence of this but that fits with "Apple's past pattern of being secretive to maximise the splash on announcement day."
Will their new cellphone only have one button, just like their mice? Just kidding...
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
The iPod works because it is a music player. It is not a music recorder. It is not a fancy music organiser. It is a music player. If you want to do anything 'clever' you plug it into a Mac and control it through a GUI that elegantly handles the complexity outside of the beautifully simple player. The iPod is also a portable harddisk. If you want to use it as such, you just plug it into a Mac, and it works as a slow, but effective harddisk.
The Apple phone should be ALOT like this.
It should be a phone. It shouldn't be a web browswer, PSP, or run my house. It should also be a data point. I should be able to do nothing more than pair my mac with my iPhone and it should just work from that point on as a data point (in the absense of anything faster / cheaper).
I'm in two minds weather you should be able to input any real data at all. I have never really used the PIM functions of my phone other than to read them. If I want to change/add/delete an entry I usually fire up the closest Mac, do it on that, then resync. The only thing I can really see me doing is adding a new phone number, and dialing and, at a push, SMS (but thats soooo 90s technology).
In that respect I could see the iPhone being almost a clone of the iPod Mini, just with a menu system aimed more at PIM data, and a jog wheel that doubles as an old style phone dialler - (no touch buttons would really make it stand out).
Apple have played and won in the music player market, because they understand that people that own MP3 players own computers too. Now that line isn't as clean in the phone market, but its not that far off - and for those of use that do own both, a phone that is designed around this paradigm is what is really missing from the market (not a phone that can access my iTMS account).
Of course this phone won't be anything like that, so it will fail. It will be another Motorola monstrosity that does everything in its power in make Cingular more money at the expense of usability, battery life and my patience. As such it will be another fish in the sea, albeit a fish with Apple branding.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
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
As I said on Macslash,
From TFA: Apple Computer is preparing a major announcement next week, dropping hints of something as critical to the company's future as the release of the original iPod in 2001.
Which is hysterical. Apple hyped the hell out of that announcement, and afterwards, everyone was just saying "An MP3 player? That's it? There's tons already" at best and "No wireless, smaller than a Nomad. Lame" [slashdot.org] at worst. No one realized that one key feature--a great UI--would set it apart and allow Apple to dominate the industry. Who would have thought at the time that it would re-define Apple as much as the iMac did 3 years earlier?
So, this new announcement is only half of the story. The other half is the effect it will have on (((whatever))) over the next few years.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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?
From all accounts, it wasn't easy to find ANY carrier to carry the iPhone. Cingular apparently was the first to give in and give it a shot.
The deal is systems like this make music players more practical. If you can combine something with the same functionality as my iPod, my cellphone, and a digital camera, into one pocketable device, I'm there. Even better, include the rest of the PDA too (except without those stupid, touch screen orientated UIs and portrait orientations, which are impractical - I want a keyboard, please, if I'm expected to enter text. Ideally, the platform should be based upon Free Software, preferably under a GPL compatable license, if not the GPL.) I'm actually not asking for a lot:
- A GSM/GPRS/UMTS phone, preferably one that takes two SIMs, allowing it to listen on two networks simultaneously. Quadband and UMA support would be perfect
- A 3 megapixel Kodak-quality camera
- The ability to act as an 802.11g peer or hub, with the machine showing up as a basic server on the network that you can just copy files to and from, plus network routing for when the phone's in GPRS/etc mode.
- a 10G (or better) mini-HD, so I can store all my music rather than have to decide what music I'm going to listen to in advance
- Good MP3 and Ogg support
- Standardized 2.5mm handsfree and 3.5mm stereo headset jacks
- Openable to reveal a landscape touchscreen plus a minikeyboard
Some years ago, this'd have been difficult. Today, all of these exist in different boxes. How hard can it be to combine them all into one multifunction unit, with the cost benefits of one CPU running the show?You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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...
Yeah, an integrated iPod and mobile phone, from a new partnership between Apple and Motorola. Whose previous partnership brought us trivial platforms like "the Macintosh". For some value of "trivial" that approaches "momentous". Anonymous miniscule Coward.
--
make install -not war
It all has to do with frequencies and harmonics. It really could be either device because the frequency of your cell phone is more likely to have a harmonic relationship with the sounds on your cassette since the phone is used for voice transmissions. But, there are other factors like the color of the paint in the room you're listening to the recordings in. Green paint happens to have a harmonic relationship with sounds in the 22.5 kHz range which is just above the normal hearing range. (Although I can personally hear up into the 32 kHz range myself) Since most people can't hear that high, a room painted with olive green paint is the best listening environment possible.
It's preferrable to paint that color, in flat, on the ceilings, walls, floors and most funrnishings. Plus you want all of your furnishings and decor to be flat green as well. My couch and loveseat are olive green velvet. That provides the least reflection of other colors of light that would mar the quality of your playback. If you can afford to go this far, even replacing the light bulbs with green lights would help tremendously. Since I'm color blind that has the negative effect of making it look like the room turns black when I flip on the green lights. So I had to go with yellow which isn't as good but it's better than nothing. Chances are you might be able to do the green light thing though.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o