Apple ipods are dead, baby. Come on Steve, pull someting out the hat!
Link: Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | Dump your iPod, the mobile’s taking over.
Got this via Digg…
Well, the war is finally over: and the mobile phone has emerged as the winner on two key fronts. For most buyers it will be the device of choice for playing music and taking photographs. I have been trying out some of the latest mobile phones and there has been a big increase in the quality and quantity of the tracks they play, while mobile phone cameras - especially with the release of 3- and 5-megapixel models, such as the Nokia N80 and the LG KG920 - are now as good as the standard digital cameras of a couple of years ago.
So you have to wonder when the mainstream press starts publishing this sort of opinion. For quite a while now I’ve been maintaining that Apple faces a massive threat to its ipod line. A few people have looked at me as though I’ve been mad when I’ve said this. It takes me 3 sentences to change their perspective and, invariably, someone walks past us with a Sony, a Nokia or a Samsung listening to music.
Our own Tomi Ahonen is quoted in the Guardian piece thus:
Tomi Ahonen, a mobile expert, claims that with a fall in total market share (of players and phones) from 80% to 14% in 18 months, the iPod is “wilting away before our eyes”.
Get in there Tomi! 
Come on Apple. Do something!
Apple saw this coming hence the motorola rokr and slvr that run iTunes? http://www.apple.com/itunes/mobile/
Phones these days have more, and often extensible, storage capacity due to having cameras and the ability to play numerous music file formats as ringtones. The only real reason currently for my having an ipod is that most phone music players suck and the phones lack a standard 3.5mm earphone jack. If you fix those two problems then you have a winner.
Posted by Ian Jones on August 25th, 2006 at 12:38 am.“the ipod will loose out to the mobile phone”: Yeah and the news is what exactly!? Anybody who saw the closed proprietary model applied originally to Mac’s and now the ipod, Versus the openness of PC’s saw this coming donkey’s years ago. Macs and ipods will always have a lot of appeal and fans, but in the grand scheme of things, it really was never going to happen was it. As a world-domination plan, it was never really a goer!! It strikes me that other players capable of building something to compete with the ipod are just playing games with Apple and at the click of a finger they can dominate. In my honest opinion the apple/mac/ipod model really is that easy to abuse & break: sit tight, let apple learn the lessons and build the market/hype and when the time is right…strike!
cheers
Posted by steve procter on August 25th, 2006 at 3:22 pm.steve/itagg
Hi Ewan, Ian and Steve, and readers of SMS Text News, one of the very best mobile industry sources on the web!
Thanks for the nice mention. And I totally agree with you, we need some totally cool and unexpected move by Apple. I loved the courage Apple had in 2001 to launch the iPod and iTunes when “all conventional wisdom” suggested the portable music player market was dead - as Sony had been unable to revive the dying walkman market with their minidisk players - and all pundits said the music industry was dead at the height of the Napster scare. Brilliant move, which we made one of our case studies in my latest book Communities Dominate Brands with Alan Moore.
Now we need an Apple encore, eh?
Cheers!
Tomi Ahonen
Posted by Tomi T Ahonen on September 8th, 2006 at 10:45 pm.