Mobile Music and the death of the ipod
If you’d asked me a year ago whether I’d ever consider using my mobile as my audio device, I’d have smiled politely at you and thought you were slightly loopy. When you look at the user interface and simplicity of the Apple iTunes service, there is … or was… just no competition. One click purchase of tracks. Love it. It all syncs. Love it.
However over the past few days as I’ve been going in and out of London, I’ve found myself thinking and podcasts and mobile.
“I wonder if there is a podcast application for the N90?” I thought to myself the other day. Obviously there are, I haven’t looked at any directly yet though.
Music is an issue though as I have about 38 gigs of it. I don’t like being limited. I don’t really enjoy walking along the street wanting hear a particular song which I own but because of device limitations I can’t actually have it with me. The whole ‘carrying your information around’ is a total drag anyway. I want my information to be sat in the Sky, on demand, whenever I need it. Anyway I’m not going to get 38 gigs on to a mini memory card any time soon. So let’s move past that.
I can definitely get some podcasts on to my phone. It’s got a 1gb memory card inside with about 900mb free. Plus I can use T-Mobile’s super web n’ walk unlimited data plan to download the podcasts over the air. I have about 30 podcasts that I listen to across the week. If I could swap to download them on my N90, I would swap to that as my preferred podcast device. I would then only need to take my funky Shure headphones and the N90 into London. No need to carry the Nano as well.
This is revolutionary talk.
I simply would not have accepted this perspective last year. I wouldn’t have tolerated the viewpoint. I’m alarmed for Apple that I am now harbouring thoughts to dump them. In fact at one point over the weekend I thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool if Apple made iTunes available for the N90′.
Oooh dear.
More and more I’ve been looking at the N90’s music player. It doesn’t look that good. I’ve got serious issues about how good the N90’s processor will be at handling a few hundred meg of songs on a memory card. On Saturday I went through and deleted about 700 meg of photos and videos that I had on the device. (I’d sent them all to the computer or the internet) so I no longer needed them on the handset. The prime reason for deleting the files was not out of housekeeping necessity. No. It was because whenever I clicked on the ‘gallery’ in the N90, I had to wait 30 seconds or so for it to load up the images.
That is a load of crap. It’s not good enough. Poor user experience. Having freed up the memory and dumped the files, the gallery function is now extremely quick. I wonder if the music application will suffer from the same problem? If so, then Apple can relax for a while, I won’t be swapping just yet.
Your experience is typical. It is amazing how these devices that are supposed to be a “jack of all trades” when they cannot do them. Even the PDA phones have these issues.
It’s almost like they were built as prototypes and not actually to be used in that way. If Apple does get into that market, it should help keep competition on their toes.
Posted by Ben on July 24th, 2006 at 5:24 pm.An interesting, and speculative and a bit argumentative, post I came across recently on the “demise of the iPod”:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2006/07/demise_of_a_dar.html
I’m not quite as “the sky is falling” as the author of the above, but I do think Apple has some stiff competition ahead. See my post from way back in 2004 on the subject:
http://billday.com/2004/01/06
which links directly to:
Posted by Bill Day on July 24th, 2006 at 9:23 pm.http://weblogs.java.net/blog/billday/archive/2004/01/will_cell_phone.html
Ciao
I have a Nokia N91 and I love it. A lot of space, Wi-Fi (this is huge!!) and great sound quality.
Also since I am a Flash Lite developer I created some podcast applications that you might be interested to take a look at. My project is called Kero Mobile you can download it from biskero.com
Alessandro
Posted by Alessandro on July 25th, 2006 at 7:06 pm.