I completely agree with Carlo over at Mobile Music Blog.

A few points to make here -- first off, why's it always have to be about one project "killing" another. Mobile phones won't be "the iPod killer". But that doesn't mean they won't become a significant force in the mobile music player market. There seems to be an assumption that there's a fixed number of people that want to listen to portable music, and phones and iPods and Creative Zens or whatever are fighting over them. That's not necessarily true. The pervasiveness of mobile phones will create a whole new class of people listening to music on the go -- particularly if mobile is used for interactivity, not just transport.

That's me. I don't have an iPod. I specifically got an Audiovox CDM-8940 because it has a miniSD card slot and can play MP3s out of the bundled stereo headset. In fact, I've basically been waiting around for handsets to support smooth MP3 playback for a while now. (Sure, I had an Archos Multimedia 20, but that was old a few years ago.)

Second, the writer makes another assumption, that mobile phones are in a standstill and neither hardware or software won't evolve further. This simply isn't true; there's no hardware in an MP3 player, iPod or otherwise, that won't soon be in mobile phones. The only significant difference is software, and this gap is closing quickly. Apple's mobile iTunes should be proof of that.

Well said. But not only that, I'd go so far to say that mobile phones are anything but in a standstill. The progress they are making is amazing. Feature wise, they'll be surpasing just about every PDA very soon, even with screen resolution, video card capability, and processor speed. It will not be long before we can buy a phone with a 3D video card, a VGA screen, a 1/2 GHz or so processor, and a 4GB disk inside. That would come in at or faster than a Dell Axim and would have nearly the built-in storage as an iPod mini. And neither of those devices have the built in 2MP camera (or so) that it'll have. This sort of thing, and better, are cropping up in Asia. Hopefully we'll see them next year here in NA.

Anyway, I thought I'd chime in since this world is rather close to home.

The Mobile Music Blog: y teh iPod ownz, or, Rebutting the Rebuttal

Posted by Shane on April 26, 2005 2:51 PM | Permalink