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Why the Rokr Phone Is An Important Failure
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian has some interesting commentary on the new iPod cellphone." From the article: "The music-player module works like an iPod - though it lacks the clickwheel that makes its big brothers function so slickly. But overall, the impression is distinctly underwhelming. The word on the streets is that far from being the revolutionary device that will bring about media 'convergence', the Rokr is, well, just the sum of its parts. And that, it seems to me, is the most interesting thing about it."
The article mentioned Rokr lacks the clickwheel that makes its big brothers function so slickly.
I wonder if Apple is able to pull such a trick where it uses its Mighty Mouse technology to provide both keypad and clickwheel on the same surface. Icons/numbers will be displayed accordingly through this LCD-type surface.
Now that will not only change the way we interact with mobile phones. For example, on game-playing mode, this Mighty-Panel will switch to a gamepad; On net-browsing mode, it offers scrollbars, back/forward buttons.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Not to mention that having an MP3 player and a cell phone sharing the same battery is a stupid idea.
This is one of those 'high concept' ideas that may have looked good on paper but will not connect with consumers.
But that's not the way it works: instead, you have to connect the phone to your computer (using a slow USB connection) and get songs from your iTunes music library - just as you do with a conventional iPod.
Strange, I seem to get about 3KB/sec most of the time off Cingular's network here in Maryland. I really don't see the benefit in downloading 4MB files off Cingular's network, especially if you don't have the unlimited data plan. What's USB 1.0 rated at? Over 1 MB/sec? That seems to be about 300x as fast as downloading off the phone network.
Granted, it's not as portable for downloading files, but is it really worth waiting half an hour for downloading a song where there isn't EDGE or EVDO? (I haven't yet found a place where I get "EDGE" speeds in the Baltimore area).
I think the most important part of the ROKR being so underwhelming is that it looks like steve didn't even try. It was introduced, it left the stage, and was promptly forgotten.
Steve is a master marketer if nothing else, and there's no way he wouldn't have known the iPod nano presentation would utterly eclipse it. The question I ask is why so much in the way of underwhelming promotion from Apple themselves? So many people online (and I realise this isn't an ultimate metric of possible popularity) have clamoured for an iTunes phone, hoping for a brilliant interface, ipod-style design, a phone they could really enjoy using as something different.
For steve to accept something like the ROKR makes me suspect he has a point to make, but I'm not sure just what it is yet.
Ten Thousand Free Adult Desktops
...master of none. You'd probably have more space for flash storage if they had forgone the camera or the bluetooth connectivity. Either you have lower less capable modules or it's put together rather cheaply...one reason I avoid mp3 players with voice recording and FM playback shoehorned on.
But this will get better as stuff gets more and more minaturized. In 5 years we might have phones with five megapixel cameras and 20 gigs of storage. I also wonder how the U.S. phone industry will criple them.
Of course the iTunes mobile phone is limited. Steve Jobs knows what he's doing, and wants to dip his foot into the water of mobile phone music players without cannibalizing the iPod sales. He was less than enthusiastic about the phone - calling it "pretty cool", rather than his usual over-the-top evangelizing, and he looked a bit uncomfortable when using it. He made it pretty clear that this is a Motorola phone with some Apple software, and not an Apple product. The artificial 100-song limit adds to the feeling that this is a plan to get a limited presence in the mobile market, without Apple committing themselves wholeheartedly.
The iPod nano was the real star of the show. If I was from Motorola, I'd be a little annoyed that Apple upstaged the ROKR with the nano. The message seemed to be: "If you want to have music on your phone, here's a decent option, but why would you, when there is a tiny device like the iPod nano that will fit in your pocket with a normal phone, and is better in every way".
Sure this is an important phone cause of iTunes, but I already have a phone that does everything this does and more in a smaller form factor and have had it for a year. (The Audiovox SMT5600) Sure you might groan that it runs windows mobile, but it actually runs really really well. I stuck a 512M miniSD card and walk around with 200 songs on it in full mp3 stereo. So the capabilities of the phone are really just old news cept for iTunes.
Quite the contrare. Many faliures, although failures, pave the way for other things. The Apple Lisa was a failure due to price, but look at computers today.... all based on those concepts such as GUI's, icons, windows, etc. It is really hard to say if a product is a *failure* because it might lead to bigger and better things. In the middle ages, there was a process that used material and lighting to etch a pattern onto the material. such a process was said to create the Shroud of Turin by skeptics. Although it was not popular because it was a lengthy process, its general idea led to photography. this phone may lead to the next big craze.
The article may be right about the 100-song limitation being Apple's fault, but all the other design flaws of the Rokr are the fault of Motorola and/or cell carriers, not Apple.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
And why would Steve Jobs try? How much money does Apple make from a ROKR versus a Nano or even a Shuffle? I thinking it's either $0, or close to it. The whole thing is probably just an experiment to see what the wireless providers would let them get away with.
For steve to accept something like the ROKR makes me suspect he has a point to make, but I'm not sure just what it is yet.
"Buy iPods, not Phones".
Which will work for a while, but eventually (1-2 years) phones will have 4-8GB of flash, wireless transfer, and a 'good enough' UI. And then it is bye-bye for the lowend music player market. Just expect Apple to do as little as possible to help this along.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Isn't it a little premature to call Rokr a failure? I mean, sure, it wasn't the Apple-designed mana-from-heaven iPod phone many wanted, but other than that, what's so bad about it?
I ordered one yesterday at the Gold Coast Cingular store in Chicago (about two blocks from the Apple North Michigan Ave store) - one guy was already in there playing with the one demo model, and right after I walked in, two people walked "wanting to see the Rokr". From the looks of it, Cingular is special ordering all these, or at the least, can't keep them in stock in stores just yet.
Remember iPod mini's debut? Who would pay just $50 less for a mini iPod that had (at the time) 16GB less space? Or what about the iPod itself? $299 was just too much for a 5GB MP3 player. Yet both flew off the shelves, each at their own pace, but both were doubted at their beginning.
I wanted a new phone, with Bluetooth to use my Prius' hands-free system and the ability to use at least some of my iTMS songs on it. So I can't load my entire 6.5 GB music library, but my main playlist only has 80-90 songs, big deal. It doesn't look like an iPod, but quite frankly, I'm glad. Phones are primarily for making calls, and I like to use numbers to call people, not swing a clickwheel around to rotary dial - why should there have to be a clickwheel on the phone when I know of no one today that would prefer a rotary dial over touch-tone phone.
Let's wait at least until mid-week to decide if this was a failure - iTunes Japan surprised everyone in just a week, and most of the buzz has been about the nano all this week (which absolutely rocks, but is too expensive to just replace my iPod as my car's jukebox). If sales numbers are where I think they might be, this "failure" might surprise everyone just like the last two mispriced, misplaced Apple pieces.
The article mentions how the ROKR doesn't do what it should, because Apple, Motorola, and Cingular all have their own existing businesses that they don't want to see get bypassed by new technology.
I saw a picture of the ROKR on the web, and the menu looks exactly like the existing menus on my Motorola phone. I was expecting the famous Chicago font that you see on old classic Macs, and iPods nowadays. But its just the crap font used in Motorola phones. Also there's the input situation with no click wheel type of thing (or even an iPod Shuffle kind of interface)... the ROKR looks just like a standard issue cellphone, that has "iTunes" added as an extra application to the system, along with the calculator, mini browser, address book, and a java game.
The obvious thing to do would be for Apple to make the phone entirely themselves. I suppose it's possible since they ARE also a hardware company. Frankly, I'm surprised Apple allowed another company to have so much control in designing something that would be associated with the Apple brand. It doesn't end up having the Apple look or feel at all.
Apple could even launch their own cellphone service, instead of pairing with Cingular. They wouldn't even need to build their own network. Virgin Mobile is just re-branded Sprint service. So I suppose Apple could do something similar with an existing cellphone company... Offering an Apple phone to use on Apple's cellphone network.
Perhaps then Apple could truly innovate on this thing, instead of falling victim to the situation the article describes when multiple businesses try to cooperate.
The simple fact is this is not an apple product. It's a Motorola product that Motorola is paying Apple to put their name on. That would explain why it's ugly, poorly integrated, and crippled. My guess is Apple gets money for opening iTunes and for putting their name on it, but not much else.
I do security
Unlike Sony, Naptser and others Apple is consistent when it comes to songs.
All Apple Songs from iTunes Music store are 128kbps AAC's the Rokr will hold ~100 of those songs.
a 128 AAc is at least as good quality wise as a 128kbps Ogg, or a 168 mp3.
Of course that doesn't make the Rokr phone any more useful. The best suggestion to date is go get a Razor and tape a nano to the back of it. You will get a better deal on both dies of the equation.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Well, for me they aren't. I had a Nokia 3650, and regardless of form-factor oddness the interface was just dubious. Very slow, took ages and many button-presses to just get it to understand I wanted to send a text. Something like Phone book->Pick name->confirm number->create message->SMS message (as opposed to picture or what have you. Or there was another way starting from Create Message that required just as many button presses before you started typing.
I switched to the Motorola V3 to give something else a try - specifically to get away from the Nokia interfaces. The Motorola interface has proven better in some areas, the same in others. Not worse in any, except the god-awful default ringtone.
It's still not great however. Years ago, I had an Ericsson T38, and that had a great interface. Purely text-based, to create a message was just one option at the top level - 'New Message'. If you regularly sent to one person (which I did - my then-girlfriend-now-wife), you could specify person as being the default recipient. So creating an SMS consisted of three button presses - cursor down, select 'New Message', hit select to confirm default recipient and then type. And the response was instance - none of the large lag that seems increasingly common with graphically flash phones.
There's not one of the new phones I've found that's anywhere near as quick as that. I like the V3 as a phone for its size, audio quality and size of keypad. I can't help feeling that in some of the basics however phone interfaces going backwards fast.
Cheers,
Ian
Frankly, I have to ask, why worry about it? I have a treo 600 and pocket tunes. With my SD card I have been listening to MP3s and OGG files from the moment I got it. What's even better is with the 2 in 1 headset adapter I can listen to music that is paused automaticaly when a call comes in. The voice and ring also use the head set and the music restarts when I end the call. Ok, granted I am limited to 1 gig of musit at a time in my phone, but it's not that hard to change cards. And honestly, how many of you burn through a gig of music before you have a chance to get back to your system and change songs?
it's hilarious - the same networks that spout endless marketing babble about the features that are offered on their new phones, but these are the same networks that charge ridiculous bandwidth prices (often by the kb transfered) for using their networks.
there are endless studies with cel providers complaining that no one surfs the net on their phones, no one plays games on their phones - and this is exactly why.
who's going to bother surfing the net - unless it's an absolute emergency - when you are being billed by the kb?
this is why wap is such a collosal waste of time to develop for - when people are being milked money for every extra character that you have on your webpage, how are you supposed to provide ANY kind of 'rich media experience' for these customers?
we are just finishing off a celphone game for a large publisher that is just entering the mobile market - and it's a ridiculous market to try and enter into, both from a developer and a consumer perspective.
i'm not even going to get into the nightmare of developing games for celphones - you hear all these reports of millions of dollars being invested into mobile game development - and the platform is so fragmented and flat-out broken that it's a complete waste of time to get into.
it's the dot com bubble except a thousand times worse...except that when the bubble 'pops' it will only be good for consumers.
first the celphone providers forced you to ONLY use the ringtones that they provide you and threatened with lawsuits any company that dared to break that monopoly.
second the celphone providers try to force unwanted features onto consumers with new phones - which helps as far as 'market penetration' goes - but the overall impact has still be next to negligible simply because of all of the 'hidden costs' to the consumer - namely airtime.
the cost to download a 3 meg MP3 (or whatever format itunes spits songs out in) over the celphone networks would be easily 5-10 times what itunes itself charges for their songs.
so instead of a 99 cent song, you suddenly have 5+ dollars PER SONG in order to transfer the songs to your phone.
the better solution is providing integrated wifi into the ipod-type phones - then when the phone is near a wifi spot, it can just access the 'normal' internet much like a windowsCE PDA device (for example).
As hotspots continue to popup everywhere, this kind of solution would definitely be a huge boost to the consumer experience.
Gekido's Lair
I thought the phone was interesting, but not interesting to me. I immediately noticed on the specs that it supported bluetooth specifically only for voice.
I can't tell you how many people I know can't get their laptops to sync to their bluetooth phones in the one way they want them to: to be able to connect to the net
Why can't they sell a phone specifically for this market? All it would do is make phone calls, and wirelessly connect your laptop to some dialup speed connection. No bloody video camera, no lame on phone email thing, no songs, no extra ring tones... just easy net capability. I guess that would just be too obvious, and never sell well in Japan.
The Admin and the Engineer
When you purchase the licence (yes, you only ever purchase a licence) to music it comes with certain restrictions. One of the standard restrictions is over public playing. You are not granted the right to play the music in public places. I suspect that one of the main reasons that the iPhone doesn't let you use itms songs as ringtones is it is against the licence. In many ways drm doesn't reduce your rights, it just enforces the limitations more carefully.
There are dozens of phones that have been out for serveral years that can play a variety of media formats. Most of them happily let you use anything as a ringtone or message.
This Apple phone bites. I can't believe that it is getting so much press, it offers nothing new that hasn't been done before. Even buying music (full tracks) over-the-air has been around for ages. There are better ones on the market without any artificial restrictions built in. Apples marketing dept is pretty good, so I wouldn't write it off though.
Please, please, no WiFi on cell phones. I keep hearing people asking for this feature but IMHO it's a waste of time, for a couple of reasons:
1) It will add unnecessary bulk to your phone.
2) It will use more battery than the cell network
3) It reduces motivation for greater investment in true cellular mobile data networks
I've been using a 3rd generation cell phone for 2 years now. In that time, data costs have come down from 4c/KB to 0.1c/KB, and with my 100MB cap, the rate is effectively 0.03c/KB. The speed is consistently very fast - not quite wifi, but still at 250kb/s, quite comparable with ADSL. And you don't need to find a hotspot. I even surfed the net from the CBD to the airport (30km) at speed without a single dropout. Surely that's cooler than WiFi.
So, in summary - WiFi enabling a cell phone is a WOFTAM!
Seriously, the iPod is a very, very nice music player. All current mp3 playing phones are nowhere near as good as a scroll-wheeled iPod.
I'm sure it is. I never stated otherwise.
Convergence is a nice thing, and I do like it, but the camera on cell phones aren't good enough to replace an actual digital camera, and the mp3 playing phones aren't good enough to replace an actual mp3 player.
Digital music being what it is, however, what makes it a very, very nice music player is nothing that inherently is impossible to duplicate in a device like a phone (unlike the camera).
Consider, if you will, an iPod - an actual, real iPod, down to the translucent plastic and scroll wheel. There is no technical or UI reason not to be able to stuff a radio and a phone/email device in there (I use mine more for email than talk). Conversely, there is nothing magical about playing mp3 (as opposed to, say listening to radio) that makes it impossible to make a good UI for it in a phone.
Most importantly, it doesn't even have to be fully as good as the iPod; "good enough" really is good enough. My current phone only lacks a convenient way for me to download mp3:s (now I have to email them to myself which gets kind of old), and it doesn't play all my Ogg:ed audiobooks (which, by the way, the iPod can't either). The UI already is good enough for me.
Or to put in another way; a decent but not great player in my phone handily beats a wonderful player that stays at home since I carry too much crap already.
Now, if you really aren't all that into photos or music, an mp3 picture phone might be just what you are looking for.
Cameras are different than sound; optical quality really is size-limited. There are good physical reasons a camera phone - or a small standalone camera, for that matter - can't approach the optical quality or noise level of a larger one. An mp3 player isn't limited in the same way.
I really care about photography, so I carry a DSLR (a major reason I don't need still more stuff with me). I'm a casual listener; I use music and radio to entertain myself on the way to and from work. To the limit of my hearing (and my ability to care), that mp3 will sound exactly as good being played from my phone as it does from an iPod.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Convergence devices are, in the words of (I believe) Peter Rojas, a single concentrated point of failure. Right now, if my MP3 player breaks, I send it off to get repaired, and I'm deprived of the use of my MP3 player for a while.
When my convergence MP3 player/cell phone/camera/video recorder/Tivo/PDA breaks, I lose pretty much everything.
Also, with a convergence device, if want to upgrade one part, I have to upgrade/change everything. The new device might have a better MP3 player, but a worse PDA OS. With separate devices, you just upgrade the functions you want.
The article is right in its premise that the ROKR is crippled because a real iPhone threatens existing core business. But not Apple's: they don't make that much money from iTunes (maybe 4% of revenue, probably much less). No, the threatened companies are, you guessed it, the phone companies and the record labels. Every Slashdotter can guess how the labels are threatened, by every possible business model that isn't limited to conning content producers into giving away most of the value in their products, and reselling it on easily-controllable plastic discs. But the phone companies are the real problem here, as the article points out when it describes how a $1 Coldplay download costs $25 as ringtones.
Those ringtones are the most profitable (percentage yield) product the telcos sell. They didn't even really have any right to get any real take from them, but they did get their hands on the first generation of deals, when people were used to having a single ringtone for their whole lives, and didn't think hard about spending $1-3 to get it. Even if they already owned the song from which the ringtone is sampled, they could see it as a convenience fee for the sampling/installation process that put the sample into their ringer. The companies that originally offered the service fought the copyright holders, the record labels, for the chance to offer that service on existing content. And telcos backed the upstarts, in return for getting to do the charging. Now they make most of that money.
Back in the Spring, when Motorola was getting hassled by developers to whom it had announced availability of this ROKR phone, one of their VPs blurted out at a conference that the telcos were blocking it. Verizon, he said, was addicted to getting $3 every time one of their customers got a music sample as a ringtone. Even though Verizon wouldn't be in the loop on a song downloaded from iTMS to one's PC, then synced with a ROKR that just happened to be sold to its user by Verizon, Verizon still wanted to get a cut every time one of their customers used a device that Verizon had sold them to get a song.
Apple, Motorola and Verizon/Sprint/Whoever spent 6 months negotiating, and finally the ROKR is out. I believe that the real deal has been cut behind the scenes, to cut Verizon in on the real iPhone. That phone will let the iPod half actually download songs over the phone half's Internet (radio) connection. Which will allow Verizon to justify getting a cut of the revenue. Maybe Apple got Verizon to fight with the labels over who controls delivery of those copyrighted songs. Maybe it somehow leverages whatever license Verizon gets from the labels to do ringtones. Maybe it's got some kind of DRM that expires old songs - like the current ROKR's 100 song limit, which will discard many songs, many of which will be repurchased.
I expect this is all leading towards Verizon charging users every time we listen to a song, regardless of how it's delivered, or what we "bought". The simplicity of packaging creates a black box, and most consumers (especially in this exploding market of less sophisticated users) won't even realize that there's little justification for charging them so often for the same thing "under the hood".
The ROKR is the thin edge of the wedge. It's just songs now. Within 2 years it will be videos, then all multimedia content. It will all be funneled through these "phones", not necessarily because that's better for consumers, but because another little chunk of plastic that can be controlled by a "copyright controller" has finally been found to replace LPs, 8-tracks, cassettes and CDs/DVDs. If we thought getting screwed by record companies sucked, we'll be reminiscing about "the good old days" once the telcos are the new boss.
--
make install -not war
On my new Cingular phone, I tried out the web surfing just to see what it was like.
They built in a gopher-like menu system to help you navigate the internet.
Each menu has about 5 items to choose from, each item is ASCII text with no graphics. Each menu is apx 18kb.
I'll say that again just in case you blanked out...
Simple ASCII Menu of 5 items -> 18,000 bytes transfered.
They charge by the kb, so they pack shit into the stream.
"Convergence is, and always has been, overrated. The trend is, and always has been, towards more categories of electronic devices, not fewer. The world is about divergence, not convergence."
Good gravy. I'm truely amazed at some of the 'black and white' attitudes around here. Convergance is not about destroying a category of device. Never was, never will be. (Seriously, if it were, you'd think there would be much stronger attempts.) Instead, it's about convenience. My cell phone, for example, has a crappy camera. But you know what? 640 by 480 is better than 0 by 0. Why? Because I don't have the pocket space to carry my digital camera around. The 'pda' in the phone, well it's lame. However, it's far better than the other non-existent PDA I own. At least it does keep track of contacts and alarms. Cool. Music player in a phone? Is it better than an iPod? Nope, it's better than no-iPod.
Why is cell phone convergance so attractive? For the simple reason that the phone is there all the time. Pay a few more bucks, get a few basic features. Okay, they're not top of the line features, but they're still useful. The phone becomes more valuable. This is a simple premise. No need to go all "it'll never replace the real thing!". That's not the point.
I really wish these rantings came with a small dose of common sense. All this uppitiness over attempts to make your cell phone more useful. Oh those bastards.
"Derp de derp."
You realize you're typing on a computer right?
Convergence is great provided:
The obvious problem in this case is not that we don't want a cellphone that can play music but that it is intentionally crippled.
Personally, I'd love to have a device that could be a PDA, MP3 player, cellphone, and wifi/voip device all in one. The only problem is that cellphone companies always end up making things like that suck because thye try and squeeze money out of you for stupid shit. Like charging you $10 to transfer YOUR phone numbers to your new phone.
They're not going to be able to do that if your phone syncs like a Palm. They're not going to get ringtone money if you can use your own music. They're not going to get as many cellphone minutes if you can use wifi when its availible.
They are holding us back, dammit.
Life is too short to proofread.
For what it's worth (and I'm not saying it's much) here's what I think will happen:
Apple will eventually come out with an iPod that integrates a cell phone chip set. I don't mean a cell phone that also functions as an iPod, I mean the vice versa. Gone will be the speaker and mouthpiece, an archaic throwback to the cell phone's ancestral roots as a telephone. In its place will be in-ear buds (like the ones they sell now which also have an integrated mic (this is old technology). The form factor will be the same, it will just happen to make and take calls. There will be no number keys. (For the odd time when you actually dial something not already in the phone, you'll just have to scroll around to get the numbers using the scroll wheel.) Maybe they'll add a camera, if they can manage it without destroying the form.
I'd love to be listening to music on my walk to school, and then hear the music dim and the iPod's synthesized voice announce the caller's name. If I answer it by hitting the center button, the music is paused until the conversation is done. Otherwise the music keeps playing, maybe only to be briefly interupted for me to be told of a voicemail. The iPod is an audio device, and it wouldn't be a stretch to make it a two-way audio device without mucking with the nice design of it.
I know this sounds far fetched, but I'd buy such a device in a heartbeat. I'm sick of carrying around a bunch of devices, and between my cell phone and iPod, I wish the former would go away, not the latter.
The article may be right about the 100-song limitation being Apple's fault,
Everyone seems to be saying this, and also that Apple wanted it at 25 initially until Motorola finally got them to bump it up. How is this limit done? Well it seems it is done via DRM in iTunes.
The same DRM that got into iTunes initially because "Apple had no choice if they wanted to open a music store". So, Apple was painted as the good guys initially, because it wasn't their fault they had to use DRM. Now that they are using it in other ways, people are overlooking it. What next?
To any DRM appologists out there, look at what is already starting to happen. 100 songs period on your phone, and you have no control over that even with a bigger memory card.
I think that the reason convergence tends to fail most of the time is because of its implementation... not because of the concept of convergence itself.
Devices like cell phones that tried to "converge" did so poorly. My phone plays MP3s and supports BlueTooth, but the MP3s can't play through a BlueTooth headset.
Optimistically, I would like to think that the upcoming generation of convergence products will learn from past mistakes.
I am thinking that the X-Box 360 will be a perfect example of convergence done right. If it lives up to its hype, it will prove that TVs and computers and games and the internet really can converge.
Messaging systems (email/fax/voice) have come a long way in the last few years. Another good, but small, example of convergence done right.
Likewise, I think that in a few years telecommunications services will converge, and hopefully will do so properly. It might take a few attempts, but eventually we'll get our internet, TV, telephone, and whoknowswhatelse from a single pipe. Some communities already have this and they love it.
Like any product, it takes a few rounds for a company to know what to do. And the convergence concept is no different.
-David
I know what you mean. I just developed a live GPS Fleet-Tracking software package for Google Earth. IMO, it kicks ass mostly because it does everything it can to stay within data plan limits, and manages to squeeze a month's worth of 14-hour driving days into the 5MB the carrier provides with a 5-second polling interval. It took a week to devise and implement a custom, UDP-based protocol to save the TCP/IP overhead, and I spent even more weeks testing and tweaking to get the data usage down.
NEXTEL, who is the carrier for the phones it runs on, charges $20 per month for 5MB of data. Think about that. That's not even ONE mp3 file sometimes! It's $4 per megabyte (roughly 1 minute of song time)!! If you go over that amount, it's TEN DOLLARS per MB. Not exactly the environment for a rich media experience, is it? It's not even a good environment for business apps.
Who's gonna care about applications they can't afford to deploy or use?
--Jasin NataelTrue science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.