Motorola Announces E1060 Phone With iTunes Support 268
amichalo writes "Topping today's earlier news that Nokia and MS are collaborating on digital music in a cell phone, Motorola announced the E1060, a cell phone available Q4 2005 that supports MPEG-4/WMV/WMA/MP3 formats. Interestingly, Motorola is not locking themselves into Apple's iTunes, but also support Real Player. Reuters has more."
Re:Wow... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:iTunes? (Score:5, Informative)
Both divergence and convergence make sense (Score:5, Informative)
Divergence makes sense because some people just want a phone that does the phone function well. I don't really care for carrying around a shitty camera. I don't use a PDA. I don't like music. I therefore bought me a Nokia 1100 phone. Dumb as a rock phone with BW screen no bluetooth etc. Small, cheap and lasts for a month on a single charge (my mileage). When I do carry a digital camera, I want pretty good photos and carry a real digital camera.
If you look at hunting knives, you'll see a wide spectrum of just-a-blade knives to Swiss Army (does everything, but not very well). I expect that phone vendors will continue to mnake just-a-phone, but the incremental addition of a MP3 player etc is getting cheaper and adds a bunch of functionality (as well as a way to sell services), so the richer feature set will continue to grow too.
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Informative)
TransFlash is a removable flash memory format designed by SanDisk specifically for Motorola at their request. It's used in about 3-5 Motorola phones now, I think, and absolutely nowhere else. It's thin enough and small enough that you could lose it and not even realize it's gone for weeks until you need it. It's about the size as my pinky fingernail, and almost as thin. It has absolutely no redeeming qualities aside from being so insanely small that Motorola can stick a slot into their phones and say they support removable media without actually allocating serious space for it. It's FAR less useful than SD or CF, the only worthwhile removable flash media format (IMHO).
Now, in their defense, Motorola assumes that most people will put one card in their phone and leave it forever, except maybe once or twice when they replace it with a bigger one and then leave that one in forever, like a hard drive. That's probably a valid assumption, but still having a proprietary format has all the associated problems with being proprietary (no competition so high prices, can't swap between devices, etc. etc. etc.)
Forbes & Chicago Tribune on Zander & Motor (Score:3, Informative)
Making Over Motorola: If mobile communication is going to be seamless, Motorola has to be seamless. Forbes Yahoo Business: link [yahoo.com]
New chief reconnecting Motorola: Memories of earnings disappointments and last holiday season's product debacle are blurring as investors focus on rising sales and profits. link [chicagotribune.com]
Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)
If you really want a good organizer, buy one and carry it alongside your piece of crap phone. Phone manufacturers don't make $200 organizer-phones because carriers don't want to sell them because consumers don't want to buy them. (Really, consumers don't. Geeks aren't numerous or frugal enough to support the organizer-phone market.)
* Sprint and other carriers sell camera-less Treos to address the "but my workplace banned camera phones problem." Alas, they charge the same amount for one without a camera as for one with a camera.
Re:'bout time (Score:4, Informative)
" Man this took them forever. Call me a simple developer, however how hard can it be to add some more flash memory, better sound output through a headset, and modify the hardware to read MP3s. I've been pissed at the phone industry for nearly 2 years for not doing this."
It's not the first phone with those features, by far. My somewhat old Sony Ericsson K700i [sonyericsson.com] has ~ 40MB of memory and plays MP3s with good quality. I don't use it as an MP3 player in the traditional sense, but I use MP3 files as ringtones, much to the chagrin of the people around me. The FM radio has been surprisingly useful as well.
It's not easy to find in the US, but it's available online. I got an unlocked model on my last trip to Asia. A trip to Asia is a great way to remind one's self of how utterly backward the US mobile phone market is.
Who Cares? My Nokia already does that (Score:1, Informative)
Re:or, alternatively... (Score:5, Informative)
The only value in this press release is the word "iTunes." Everything else has already been done by the competiton.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hint: (Score:2, Informative)
1. "The part's compliment each other poorly" - actually they do compliment each other very well. Phones have memory, digital to analog convertors, places to pug in headphones, speakers, screens to view the track info and buttons to select everything. In addition, a lot of phone manufacturer have already crossed the licensing threshold for MP3 and AAC by supporting those formats for ringtones. Trust me, adding a simple MP3 player adds virtually no cost or hinderance to the manufacturers. In addition, playback quality being as good as say, an iPod is a given. Indeed, for example, some people say the Sharp 902 sounds even better. Storage is currently on SD Cards (typically 1G maximum right now) but you *will* see HDD equiped cellphones real soon now.
2. "Meanwhile, there's interference. You want to be able to pause your mp3 player to answer your phone without losing your place" - at first I thought you meant radio interference but I see you mean interference with calling. Either way, both are no problem: automatically pause the music for the call and then resume when you finish the call.
3. "You want to be able to run your mp3 player all night without your phone battery being dead in the morning" - well, it all depends how big your battery is and how efficient your radio is. I must admit 8 hours audio playback and then expecting a day of phone use (how many minutes talking?) would be difficult, but most people do charge their phones. As for when we get fuel cells... well, no problem!
The key thing with this Motorola phone is that Moto got a licensed from Apple for the DRM. That's the impressive part - they got a legal agreement - not the technical part. Other manufacturer's have AAC playback (the Sharp TM200 springs to mind) but without that DRM support people aren't going to be able to stick iTMS content onto their phone and have it playback, that is, unless they use something like hymn.
Apple better watch out though - there are a LOT more phones sold every week than iPods and if they restrict their DRM licensing to just a select few, I am sure Microsoft will win out.
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You aren't looking at the problem right (Score:3, Informative)
There's another advantage of converged devices: you can get functions that are a "mix" of the two, which often turn out to be useful in their own right.
The Treo is a smartphone: a mobile phone and a PDA. But it's called "Treo" because it has three functions: mobile phone, PDA, and mobile Internet. The third function is a mix of the first two.
It's like mobile phones with cameras. Sure, they have mobile phone and camera capabilities. But the telco industry is betting that people will get into the third capability: sending MMS photo messages to their friends. (Although as of now, it hasn't taken off like SMS has.)
Having MP3 playback on the Treo has one unexpected, but welcome side-effect: when you're listening to music and a call comes in, you can hear the ring through your headphones. This is a godsend for those of us who play our music loud and would otherwise miss calls...
(Now, I shall proceed to debunk all my arguments. I admit to owning both a Treo 600 and an iPod shuffle.)
Re:Wow... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Informative)
AAC is part of the MPEG-4 standard, which this phone supports...