No iTunes on Motorola E1060 (UPDATE)
No iTunes on Motorola E1060 (UPDATE)
by , 10:25 AM EST, February 16th, 2005
Motorola's E1060 mobile phone unveiled Monday will not have iTunes compatibility and is not "the" iTunes phone, TMO has learned.
The demonstration of iTunes capabilities on the E1060 at the 3GSM World Congress where it was introduced was simply to show off the technology. Reuters apparently misunderstood this in their story, which created a snowball effect and led other outlets to proclaim the E1060 the iTunes phone.
"It appears that Motorola was demonstrating the capabilities of playing iTunes music on the E1060, but that the E1060 is not going to have the ability to play iTunes songs," Jason Gales of MobileTracker, which broke the story, told TMO. Alan Buddendeck, direct of public relations at Motorola, has confirmed this same report to TMO.
MacWorld UK reported Wednesday a Motorola spokeswoman confirming, "this product was used only as a demo to showcase the iTunes application...For competitive reasons, we are holding information (including specifications and design) very closely until the appropriate time and venue for product launch...We will be announcing the first iTunes phone in the near future."
Mr. Gales suspects Motorola may roll out the actual iTunes-compatible phone at the CTIA Wireless convention in New Orleans next month.
Observer Comments
Quotekwameaj wrote:
I knew it wasn't it. Apple will want to make a splash with it. Given the Nokia-Microsoft deal, the iTunes phones should be something more newsworthy than what we saw.
By the way, won't the sale of this phone eat into the iPod shuffle market?
it may have a small impact on the shuffle market, but i dont think that much
this phone will probably be available for very few providers, and will also probably require bluetooth to sync the files
shuffle uses USB, and everyone now has USB
TRO
Wed Feb 16, 2005 12:24 pm Subject: Re: iTunes Phone
QuoteSmall White Car wrote:Quotekwameaj wrote:
By the way, won't the sale of this phone eat into the iPod shuffle market?
Do we know what kind of memory the phone will have? I think 256 KB is reasonable. If someone wants a 1 GB shuffle, that certainly won't appeal to them.
Nor do we know what the price of the phone will be. Even with carrier subsidies, prices on some "trendy" phones is outrageous. Look at the RAZR, which is going for $500 with a 2-year contract. The iTunes phone could be priced at that point, it could be a freebie phone, or any where in between. We just don't know.
I think that eventually (2+ years), cellphones may offer competition to flash based players like the shuffle. But Apple is likely to strike deals with other manufactures (it'll be a race to see who signs more deals: Apple or Microsoft). So while their revenue per-unit will go down, the volume of cell phone sales is huge compared to that of MP3 players. Nearly 700 million cell phones were sold world-wide last year. The license revenue for Apple could be huge, and the manufacturing cost to Apple would be zero.
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