Bill Day's Blog

Will Cell Phones Render iPods Obselete?

I've been reading the buzz for the last couple of weeks that Apple would launch a smaller version of their iPod music player at MacWorld. Enter the iPod mini, announced in today's Jobs keynote.

Thinking about my blog from a couple of weeks ago on the emergence of cellcams, I had to wonder: Is the iPod mini too little too late?

Phones are already shipping with add-on support for MP3 playback, and many new models (such as the 6230 I mentioned in my previous blog) have MP3 players built-in. If you don't need every MP3 on your PC with you at all times and instead are happy to take along a reasonable subset of your favorite tunes, say 256MB worth (MMC and SD cards aren't available in the 4GB range that iPod mini debuts at), then cell phones with built in music support (cellpods?) may just do the trick. And if you already have your cell phone with you all the time anyway, why not have your favorite tunes on it too?

Will cellpods drive the iPod mini and other dedicated digital music players increasingly up market the same way they are putting pressure on dedicated digital cameras? Or will Apple deliver on rumors that have been floating around for months that they might be working on an iPhone, one upping the cellpod makers at their own game? Time, and consumer acceptance, will tell.

Comments

• I doubt it
  The difference, of course, is the capacity; i.e., 256MB vs. 4GB. If capacity didn't matter, cellphones would already have overtaken the iPod, before the Mini.

  Yes, flash memory used in cellphones will increase, but so will the hard drive capacity of the Mini. It's likely that we'll continue to see a 16x ratio.

  Battery life of a cellphone is also not on par with an iPod. It doesn't matter much if you can hold 50 or 1,000 songs if you can only play a dozen of them.

  Personally, I just use my cellphone to place and receive calls. ;)

  Posted by: jimothy on January 06, 2004 at 02:04 PM

• I'd rather have a phone in my iPod
  It would be weird dialing with the rotary slider thing, but maybe they could resurrect the old rotary dial interface :-)

  Actually, the battery really is the constraint on all these things, and Moore's Law doesn't seem to apply to batteries. I have a Treo 270 phone/pda/browser/email thingie that is only good for a couple hours of browsing or maybe 45 minutes of talking away from a power source.

  Posted by: mchampion on January 06, 2004 at 02:46 PM

• I'd rather have a phone in my iPod
  I'm with you. I'd further like it if you had to sidetalk with it like the N-Gage.

  Posted by: comforteagle on January 06, 2004 at 03:12 PM

• I am still waiting
  I want cell phone size. 20+ gigs of storage, gps, mp3 player, high camera/camcorder all in one.

  They keep nickle and dime'ing the technology out. Just give me what I want :)

  AND for 300.00 bucks or less.

  Posted by: matthew_payne on January 06, 2004 at 03:42 PM

• Phones operate in a different context.
  Bear in the mind that currently, mobile phones (or cell phones) operate in a slightly different context than iPod.

  One major difference is that mobile phones are wireless. I guess you can have a wireless iPod but it would likely be restricted to Bluetooth. Contrast this with mobile phones which operate in a larger and longer range network.

  This means services such as iTunes Music Store or iTunes would need to operate over mobile phone networks and meet users' expectations. This will require co-operation between mobile network operators and music service providers to sort out issues such as how much to charge for transactions like music downloads. Would it be a one off payment to the music store, or would users have to pay a per kilobyte rate for data usage on their mobile phones as well?

  Posted by: honhwang on January 06, 2004 at 03:47 PM

• The trouble with local storage...
  Personally, I'd rather have network access to my media collection. Even with increasing local storage capacity on these small devices, it's never enough. I like my iPod, but synchronization is a pain when you can only fit 1/3 of your music collection on it at any given time.

  I know, I know, poor battery life and flaky always-on network connections are the limiting factors here. But advances in both are in sight, and it's time we looked ahead instead of coming out with yet another X MB portable MP3 player/cell phone. What I want is a J2ME version of Mu (http://mu.dev.java.net) on my cell phone talking to my JReceiver (http://jreceiver.sf.net) server at home. I could access any track, playlist, or internet radio station on my mobile. With MIDP2, MMAPI, etc., the technology is here today, but poor network infrastructure prevents this from becoming the next killer app.

  So Bill, I think you've got the right idea... There's a huge end-to-end-Java story waiting to happen here...

  Posted by: campbell on January 06, 2004 at 03:52 PM

• I doubt it
  "Battery life of a cellphone is also not on par with an iPod."

  ...I agree 100%, but not for the same reason. My mp3 player is there to entertain me and its ok when the battery runs down. On the other hand, I want my mobile to stay on as long as possible. My choice of mobile has always been to get the crappiest models because the /battery life is better/ without the extra features (colour, video, camera, sampled sound, ...and especially IR, bluetooth).

  Posted by: ba22a on January 07, 2004 at 04:14 AM

• A more important question
  What I wonder is if the iPod down the line might morph into a family of iDevices. 1 GB flash devices are already here, 4GB will be here next year. It will be a while before the capacity of an iPod will be matched by a phone/pda. In the mean time I expect Apple to start creating newer devices, some of them I am sure will compete with present day phones and pda.

  my 2 euro cents
  Suhail

  Posted by: suhail on January 07, 2004 at 06:37 AM

• No, they won't
  Cell phones won't make the iPod obsolete, just like they won't make the better digital cameras and PDAs obsolete. Why? Because they're inferior. What cell phones WILL make obsolete is all the low-end stuff in those categories. They'll make low-capacity MP3 players and low-end cameras and low-end PDAs obsolete.

  Personally, I wish the phone manufacturers and service providers would spend less effort on all these gimmicks and instead focus on making cell phones better phones. They're too unreliable, with too many dropped connections, too much garbled sound, etc.

  There's not enough competition, either. I hate all the lock-in that the industry strives for. We finally get a law requiring portable phone numbers, but it was written with lots of loopholes so they're doing a lousy job of implementing it, and how about the lock-in of the phone itself? Why can't I take my Nokia that I got when I signed up for AT&T Wireless, and use it with T-Mobile? It's ridiculous. Sure, I can get a new "free" phone and throw away the old one, but is it really free? No, I'm just paying for it in the price of the service contract. There must be tons of profit in this market - how else could there be a wireless retail store in every strip mall in America? That's a lot of rent we consumers are helping to pay.

  OK, I'll get off my soapbox now. :)
  

  Posted by: kdenehy on January 07, 2004 at 07:02 AM

• Personal Server
  I believe that eventually, we'll carry objects that are specialized interfaces for certain tasks, e.g. a screen and dial pad for making calls, a two line display and play, skip, .etc. buttons for mp3 playback.

  Data storage, net access, and other common resources will be moved into a separate device that can be used by all of these interfaces.

  Take a look at Intel's Personal Server for an example of this:
  http://www.intel.com/labs/features/rs08031.htm

  Posted by: jt2190 on January 07, 2004 at 01:09 PM

• user interface
  To design a good user interface for a multi purpose device is a major challenge. Imagine ipod having the ability to send make phone calls and sending sms. It will probably undermine its user interface elegance.

  Posted by: cfoong on January 08, 2004 at 06:24 AM

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