Major Hangups Over the iPod Phone

chadwick writes "It seemed like a sure thing: the iPod mobile phone. What could be more irresistible than a device combining the digital-music prowess of Apple Computer (AAPL) with the wireless expertise of Motorola (MOT)? Motorola sent its buzz machinery into overdrive in January when it leaked word that the product would debut at a cellular-industry conference in New Orleans in mid-March. Well, hold the phone. At the New Orleans confab, a frustrated Edward Zander, Motorola's chief executive, stood before a roomful of analysts and reporters and said the handset's debut would have to wait. "

Hello Moto

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, what do you expect when you partner two large companies together, for a collaboration project... there's bound to be issues combining work forces on a single project. I'm not all that surprised. But, I don't think they have much to worry about, since even if mp3 phones come out with lots of storage, it's unlikely they'll have the same appeal the apple brand has.

Re:Say WHY

[jonwil]

Thankfully that cant happen in a country like Australia with REAL compeition in the phone market and REAL choice of phones.

Re:Pre announcements

[BWJones]

Nobody gets hurt...

But it is of course dishonest to both your customers and shareholders. For companies that want to build quality relationships with their customers, this is bad policy. You've heard of vaporware? Yeah, that's what your customers begin to expect and why companies like Microsoft, HP (under Carly) and others have lost the respect of many of their customers. Concept products are one thing, in that they are designed to get a feeling for how your customer base would react to such a product, but there is no expectation of that concept being actually produced in its current form. Pre-announcing is simply dishonest.

Ring Tones are the problem here!

[SteveXE]

The problem isnt the feature rich phone, the problem is carriers have some how got people to pay $1-4 for STUPID RINGTONES!!!! Itunes charges me $1 for a song whether its 1 min or 10 min, but a 3 second repeating ringtone costs me $2 or a 12 kbps 30 seconds clip of a song cost me $4...wtf is all I can say.

The phone companies wont let people do what we want with our phones until we stop letting them rape our wallets! $1.50 for a 32x32 pixel background image! Why cant i just send myself a custom made BG for free? Easy because stupid people pay, and they keep paying.

Change wont take long, if we all stopped buying ringtones and bullshit for our phones then change would happen pretty quick, its a broken buisness model made to screw the customers out of even more money, dont fall for it!

The real reason the iPodPhone should be droppped..

[Trillan]

...is that nobody cares. Honestly, who's in the market for one of these phones? Phones have a short enough battery life.

Everyone's excited now, but wait until it ships.

Re:Why?!

[jollyrog]

Carrying around a cell phone in my pocket is annoying enough, but having to lug another device is why I haven't bought an MP3 player or PDA.

Being a student at the University, I move around a lot during the day between libraries, classes, and gyms, and having an mp3 player during the day would be great, but I've already got my phone in one pocket, keys in the other, and wallet in the back.

Ubiquitous computing

[Valthezeh]

I love this idea. I hope things keep going in this direction, because I like the idea of my phone doing everything. Acting as my TV remote, my car door opener, my camera, my ipod, my palm pilot, my mobile stock/email/sports scores report... As well as the ability to interface with other technology to keep me updated on things like whether my oven is on...

I read a few weeks ago about a cell phone company in Japan working on this, and despite my reservations due to privacy concerns, I really can't wait until this kind of technology becomes widely available.

Motorola should have known this

[gjh]

It was idiotic even trying to launch this thing in the USA. Carriers have a strange-hold over this market. Nokia has a range over over 100 handsets - you can buy about 6 of these on US carrier contracts, not including decent phones with WLAN and Bluetooth [nokia-asia.com].

I cannot understand why Apple is sodding around with Motorola on this. They should have partnered with Nokia.

As an aside, Apple should also partner with Shazam [shazam.com]. The best thing that an iPod/phone combo could do is recognize music from an online database and buy it for you.

Hey Mods: The TRUTH is NOT flamebait!

[mrchaotica]

Why are we putting up with this kind of thing in here in the US, anyway? I mean I'm not, personally -- I don't own a cellphone. But that's because there's no way in hell I'd pay someone to cripple the device for me, just to force me to pay them more money! Why are there so many sheeple here to let them get away with it?

We need to change this

[HairyCanary]

I see nothing but dark clouds in the future of cell phones in America unless we take back control from the corporations. We must divorce the hardware from the service, just like we did for wired telephone service. You should be able to buy whatever phone YOU want, with whatever feature set YOU want, and connect to whatever carrier YOU want. Verizon in particular has already shown us exactly how they want to control us.

uh, me for one.

[uncadonna]

From the linked article; "Who wants the $500 iPod phone when you could buy a phone and an iPod for that much?" says analyst Tole Hart of researcher Gartner.

Does anybody else not understand the question? Is this guy saying I'd rather carry two gizmos than one because, I'd have, like, more stuff?

Motorola

[diggory]

I've seen a lot of mobile phones - I'm in the UK - and they've been prevalent for over a decade now. One of the things that amazes me about them is this: 1 - Motorola can't make good ones. 2 - That doesn't seem to stop people buying Motorola phones. I always warn people not to buy Motorola - they are always buggy and frequently crash completely (i.e. lock-up and require rebooting.) Yet they always buy them, and regret it a few months down the line. I think it has something to do with the form-factor - people couldn't get enough of the star-tac and that was awful. I'm not surprised that they're having problems with the phone - I bet it'll be a dog once it's released as well.

Re:Pre announcements

[soupdevil]

It's not "simply" dishonest -- it's dishonest in tricky and complex ways.

Re:Pre announcements

[BasilBrush]

You never "checked". Apple does not release information on their gross or net profits per song. There has been a credible analyst that puts it at 25c proft, and an analyst in TFA puts it at 4c. Truth is we really don't know.

Re:Pre announcements

[BWJones]

Last I checked, apple pays 60c per song and resells them for 99c. That is approximately a 40% margin.

Where did you check? Because the numbers I have (as a shareholder) reveal that margins are closer to 6%. Analysts such as Piper Jaffray estimate its anywhere from %5 to 10% and some analysts have suggested that Apple has actually lost some money in the first year on iTunes.

You obviously have no concept of margins in e-commerce. Otherwise you wouldn't be saying that.

My investment portfolio says otherwise.

Next time try to make your argument stick in real world scenerios......

What is it that we are talking about here? In case you did not know, the iTMS is a real world investment.

rather than make believe BS you want to spout off to try to look smart

I'll let the Ph.D. and my publications speak to that. Look, there is no need to be rude on this forum as there are many here that are trying to keep Slashdot an informative place to go. What exactly is it that you are trying to say?

Re:Why?!

[mzwaterski]

You want to trade your phone up, but you don't want new features? And...why do you care if I want a phone that has an mp3 player. If you really need a reason, here it is:

I already carry my cell phone with me, it would be nice if I didn't have to carry a second device but had the ability to listen to mp3's when I felt like it. Is that really so difficult to fathom? Lets move on.

APPLE PHONES

[Anonymous Coward]

1- Set on vibrate
2- Insert into anus
3- Wait for phone call from Steve Jobs

Telco Cartel Hates its Customers

[Doc Ruby]

" Motorola and Apple would let customers put any digital tune they already own on their phones for free."

"Verizon, Cingular, and other wireless operators want customers to pay to put music on phones. They think getting a full song should be like getting a ring tone, snippets for which customers now pay from 99 to $3."

So the mobile carriers are screwing us, because they think they can force us to pay the phone company to put music we already own onto phones that we own. They have absolutely nothing to do with this transaction, except that they can force the phone maker to skip the feature. They don't even have the usual fake cartel argument that this transaction between you, the phone and the copyright holder somehow competes "unfairly" with anything they're trying to sell. No, it's just greed and monopoly, pure and simple.

The carriers are also stopping Palm from putting Bluetooth and WiFi support either into the phones, or in the SDIO slot specs. Because that could somehow allow unlimited use of your phone with your network, which conflicts with their plans to make you pay for every bit transacted. These people are standing in the way of the entire telecom future, as if the RBOCs stood at the gates of the Internet in 1990, forcing PC makers to cripple motherboards to pay the RBOCs for every bit transacted, over a modem or otherwise. The sooner they're destroyed, the better.

Re:Why?!

[soft_guy]

Give me a fucking break. Carrying a phone vs. a phone and an iPod or PDA is actually a pain in the ass. It's the whole reason why I bought a Treo so that I wouldn't have to lug a Tungsten C AND a cell phone around.

Here's what would be more irresistable

[metamatic]

What could be more irresistible than a device combining the digital-music prowess of Apple Computer (AAPL) with the wireless expertise of Motorola (MOT)?

A device combining the digital music prowess of Apple, the user interface design of Apple, the build quality of Apple, and the wireless expertise of Nokia.

Frankly, Motorola's user interface is a hideous piece of crap that doesn't seem to have improved since the 80s: menus that SHOUT AT YOU, and a phone book that still can't cope with people having more than one phone number (duh!). No matter how good the RAZR looks, it's the same craptastic software on it, and that's why I'm not gonna touch it.

Re:Pre announcements

[Ikarius_rb]

Gee, it would be good if you actually read the article. The product works and is ready to go, in the time frame they projected. Motorola isn't at fault in the slightest here. The real problem is that the cell carriers are looking at this and going "Where's OUR profit in this?" Verizon and Cingular are trying to extort more money out of the deal, so they're stonewalling on selling the phone until apple/motorola cut them in for some new revenue streams. Not that this is new for Verizion. They want a way to charge for every new feature that goes into the phones...

Re:The real reason the iPodPhone should be dropppe

[Ibanez]

Sounds like a rehashing of the iPod release. Will people ever learn?

Re:Pre announcements

[ePhil_One]

But it is of course dishonest to both your customers and shareholders.

But according to the article the problem isn't that the phone isn't ready, the problem is the carriers don't want to sell it unless they can charge $.99 each song you install. By announcing it, consumers can pressure the carriers to support the phone.

Of course, this sounds a bit odd, as carriers still sell phones that don't support all those wacky pictures and backgrounds, and being the only carrier to sell the iPod phone seems like a great draw to me. So Moto might be playing the blame game as a diversion to buy more time, though I can't imagine there's anything complex about taping a cell phone to an iPod beyond where do the buttons go and how long do the batteries last...

Re:Pre announcements

[Anonymous Coward]

BWJONES: "The problem of course is that on sales of the songs themselves, Apple's profit is next to nothing."

mp3phish: "Last I checked, apple pays 60c per song and resells them for 99c. That is approximately a 40% margin"

mp3phish: "With all due respect, I hope your Ph.D. it is not business, being that you cannot accurately define margin and profit."

Hang on. Earlier BWJones says apple's profit is next to nothing. Then you countered with a comment that they had a 40% margin... Then you go on with a rant that says BWJones cannot accurately define margin and profit. You say profits are not the same as margin

Which contradicts your entire response in an earlier post! BWJones says Apple has next to no profit, and then you tried equating it to margin.

Contradicting yourself isn't a very good idea you know. It makes you look like a bleeding idiot trying to childishly twist facts to your own existing beliefs.

Reliability of your sources?

[Ohreally_factor]

You pretty much lost me with your first source, downhillbattle.org, which lost all credibility (with me, anyway) after the iPod battery hoax/fiasco.

Integrated Devices

[itsthebin]

a phone with itunes - whoda thunk it. I have seen quite a few of these phone integrated devices , the PDA/Phones... Can you turn the device on without actually activating the phone? if not it becomes a paperweight while you are on the aeroplane. as for the music playing phone - there are many phones out there with either hardware or software Mp3 players built in...though I would rather use my axim x50v I do not see the attraction of itunes .... sheep are cute , sheep are cute , sheep are soft and curly....

Re:Hey Mods: The TRUTH is NOT flamebait!

[metlin]

Well because to most people (and that includes me) a cellphone is nothing more than a tool and an instrument.

I'm a student, and since I'm simply not grounded enough to have a landline, I have a cellphone. Helps me when I take weekends off and shift apartments and dorms every other semester.

Quite honestly, while all the features sound oh-so-cool and and wonderful, I do not honestly care - I have a very basic phone that lets me do ONE thing properly - TALK. Any phone with decent battery life, good signal reception and a clear channel is good enough. Often times, the base model does suffice and that's more than sufficient for me.

Hell, who cares? If I wanted to send images and stuff, I'd get a good enough PDA for that. A phone is primarily a communication device. Any fancy stuff merely eats up battery.

And oh, as someone who does a lot of outdoor stuff, I've come to realize that battery life is quite important, and more features just eat up more battery life real quickly.

So, to answer your question - the kind who pay to buy crippled stuff are mostly the dumb folks (and usually with cash to blow for spending just $2.50 per MMS or whatever) or the folks who want the latest cool thing (the Oooh! Lookie there! Shiny, shiny! My phone can do _this_! That makes me _so_ proud of my manhood). Very few have a genuine need to see a movie on their cellphone or have any use for any of the quintillion features that the phone may have.

What bloody difference does it make? It's a thing for talking, for cryin' out loud. Bah!

Re:Pre announcements

[thparker]

Again, I'll reiterate that you don't really seem to understand business. Gross margin, which is what you're talking about, is a fine starting point but just isn't the end of the story. But you aren't even including all the components of their direct margin -- you're taking one direct cost, the record label fee, and saying that, wow, that's an awesome margin. But that's NOT their margin, direct or otherwise. It's just their net revenue after a single direct cost, which is pretty meaningless.

I think your confusion is coming from trying to compare this to physical products, where you buy something tangible from one person and resell it to another. That's not what is happening here. Apple is not buying 100,000 Brittany .AAC files from RIAA and reselling them. They're providing digital files and distribution, and the cost of goods sold calculation is somewhat more involved.

Re:Pre announcements

[M-G]

I used to believe them until I found out how much phones cost overseas: less than they cost here with a 2yr contract

You can buy lots of things at lower retail costs overseas. Take the recent discussions about textbook costs. But the higher price in the US isn't because of the retailer making a higher margin, it's because their wholesale cost is higher.

So even though a consumer may be able to buy phone x overseas for USD200, it doesn't mean that the US carrier doesn't have to pay USD250 for them.