The amount of news surrounding the Apple iPod has been increasing almost exponentially. This week it was the Real Player compatibility announcement and now the Motorola phone deal.
What does this all mean? It means that time is critical for anyone trying to gain share in this market. Read on…….
The amount of news surrounding the Apple iPod has been increasing almost exponentially. This week it was the Real Player compatibility announcement and now the Motorola phone deal. What does this all mean? It means that time is critical for anyone trying to gain share in this market.
I still think the automobile battlefield is number one right now, even though the BMW announcement is old news. Portability is the what it is all about and hand held players are the soldiers on the battlefield for compressed music sourced from the internet. With satellite radio in its infancy, getting compressed music into the car is critical. Certainly, the ability to play MP3 encoded CD’s has been around for a while, but centering around hard drive based portable music players like the iPod is a way to extend the usefulness of what has become a ubiquitous device.
Bluetooth enabled cars already integrate with the mobile phone, so the Motorola move may have serious future implications. As the size of storage devices shrink and capacity increases, it is not unlikely that the mobile phone could subsume the function of a stand alone music player. I ditched my Palm for the convenience of a Bluetooth phone and iSync some time ago. One less thing to carry around. Phones have built in cameras, but they don’t come close to what I need – yet….
On the home front, Airport Express is a start, but certainly not a breakthrough product to get compressed music out of the PC in people’s houses. This is the arena where Apple must beat Microsoft early and decisively.
