Apple and Motorola's announcement that the phone maker's new handsets will come equipped with iTunes may raise a few eyebrows. Is Apple shooting itself in the foot by encouraging users to turn away from the iPod cash cow?
As Jobs and others have publicly stated on several occasions, iTunes doesn't make the company a huge amount of money. The commercial strategy behind the song shop is to drive the sales of the iPod, which it has certainly been doing. So why would Apple want users to shun one of its most lucrative products?
One theory is that if MP3 mobiles are going to happen anyway and it looks like they are - O2 and Sony have already teamed up on a similar device - it's a sound move for Apple to be the first to get a foot in the door and boost its brand.
Promoting acceptance of Apple's digital format and DRM (digital rights management) system as the mobile standard could also serve the company well in the future.
But could the mobile union come back to haunt Apple by challenging the iPod? The Motorola iTunes phones can't compete with the iPod on storage capacity - they hold several hours' worth of music, not much compared to the iPod's 10,000 tracks or even the iPod Mini's 1,000 songs.
Yet those several hours may be enough, given that most people use their iPods on relatively short train journeys, during daily commutes or while exercising.
Looking at pre-teens in particular - one of the largest music-buying and mobile-mad segments out there - the idea of a phone with music functionality will be highly tempting for those on a pocket money budget.
Getting consumers loyal to iTunes at an early age could boost the song-shop's revenue as well as remove the need for the pre-teens - or, let's face it, their parents - to splash out on the more expensive iPod.
For the music fans and pop-culture worshippers alike, such mobiles will never compete with the desirable iPod for storage, functionality or, in all honesty, cool.
Perhaps one way for Jobs and co. to secure their lead in the digital music market is to launch an iPod-phone combo. Analysts have been speculating for some time that Apple is gearing up to take on the PDA space - and it's only a small jump to create a smart phone or music mobile.
Stranger things have happened.
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. Rob Nieboer
You've missed the plot sunshine! What makes the iPod great is that you can literally take several weeks worth of music with you.
Those that have become addicted to iPods as I have know that you can't predict which 2 or 3 hours worth of music you might want to listen to on that proverbial train trip. You certainly don't have time to "reconfigure" a program of 2 to 3 hours of music listening every time you go out. It is precisely the ability to have literally hundreds of CD's of music on your iPod that makes iPod so compelling.
Having a mobile with only 2 or 3 hours worth of capacity would drive you crazy trying to figure out which 2 or 3 hours you should have on the mobile at any one time!
The 'Pod is not under threat from a mobile any time soon!
2. Alan
Why on earth are Silicon and its ilk so fixated on the iPOD? According to Business Week magazine iPOD has something like 25% of the MP3 player market.
To read most of the journalism on this subject you would think iPOD had 99.999% of the market.
Creative, Rio, iRiver and many, many others are also out there and selling in volume (most at lower cost and higher availability too). C'mon guys, wake up and listen to the music.
3. Barnendu Goswami
Removable media (flash-media or other similar format/footprints) will make the crossover phone device more accessible as a multimedia playback device. Flash and similar formats are getting bigger an cheaper now, so this is certainly plausible. 512 Mb to 1 Gb capacity are starting to become a lot more common, and a VCD resolution MPEG4 video or 10 CDs worth of music, will easily fit to these capacities, so I think the only reason we don't have this capability already, is that the manufacturers of these devices have been keeping it back with a purpose. Devices like the Mustek DV4000 make it clear that the technology to do this is cheap and has been available for some time now.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is that reason. They don't want you copying your own data to the phone do they? Why would they want that, when they can make lots of money out of us (again!) buying it off their web-pages?
It's not the immediate death of iPOD-like devices (Happy Alan?), but it's an innevitable evolution. The industry as a whole, is very keen to infect our lives with DRM, so it's not really a shot in the foot - it's a shot in the arm...for DRM