Monday, July 26, 2004

Apple & Motorola announce iTunes for mobile phones

In a surprise announcement today, Motorola and Apple unveiled the iTunes mobile music player, which Motorola will include on its mobile phones. This announcement represents the first product besides the iPod that will be able to play copy protected iTunes Music Store songs.

Interestingly, this announcement coincides with the preview of Motorola's new V3 Razor phone, which has some very Apple-like design features, like a Titanium body and an ultra slim profile. It's unfortunate that this phone won't be able to play very many songs due to its small memory size, but one might suspect that copy protected ring tones, etc. will also be available for (paid) download from the iTunes Music Store.

I wonder if Apple will also licence the player to Nokia and Sony Ericsson. If not then Nokia is left out in the cold. As for Sony, I wonder how interested they would be in it anyway, since they have really tried to pushed their ATRAC format, although I'm not sure Ericsson would want to back ATRAC (for good reason).

1 comment:

Eug said...

Heh. I see you're registered. You must have a blog too, no?