Digital Noise: Music and Tech

iPhone applications featuring particular musicians have been around for a while now--Nine Inch Nails was recently in the news when Apple rejected an update to its application, and tech companies like Melodeo and The Orchard have experimented with creating iPhone apps for their clients.

In the teaser video for the new U2 BlackBerry app, this map of a concert venue appears immediately after the text "Experience the tour from all angles." My guess: you'll be able to shoot and share concert videos.

(Credit: Research In Motion)

Soon, BlackBerry fans will be able to get in on the fun. Research In Motion, which is sponsoring the U2 360 tour, has posted a page on its Web site declaring the imminent arrival of the U2 "mobile album."

Although the video teaser is fairly cryptic, it looks like the app will let users listen to the latest U2 album "No Line on the Horizon," watch videos, and read news updates. A more interesting twist: it also looks like users will be able to share video clips from U2 concerts--a map will let you pick among BlackBerry-toting audience members with different stage angles.

U2 fans with BlackBerries can sign up here to be informed when the app's released. No word yet on timing or pricing. One possibility: the app might launch in conjunction with the Blackberry Tour 9630 on July 12.

Whether you're a U2 fan or not, it's great to see RIM getting serious about mobile music, and I think it'll help cement RIM's position alongside Apple at the top of the consumer smartphone heap.

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The reviews are in on the Storm, the new touch-screen phone from Research In Motion, and nobody loves it. Check out takes from CNET, Engadget, Gizmodo, and Time for a sample.

In particular, the mechanics of the touch screen--you have to press areas on the screen with some force, as if they're actually keys--have been greeted with almost universal frustration.

Looks great, but how does it sound?

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

But for a would-be iPhone killer, the reviews are remarkably light on the Storm's music features. It's true that BlackBerry users are traditionally e-mail junkies, and the phone's communications features (apart from the touchscreen weirdness) are expectedly top-notch. But if this is going to be a consumer phone--Verizon's attempt to make up for its epic fail in passing up first rights to the iPhone--music is critical. A big part of the appeal of the iPhone is that you don't have to carry around a separate cell phone and MP3 player anymore.

Apparently, though, the Storm isn't much of an improvement over the nontouch BlackBerry Bold, which was announced in the summer and came out a couple weeks ago. The Storm's got an 8GB microSD card, as opposed to the Bold's 1GB, but otherwise, it uses the same media management program from Roxio (known for creating functional but not particularly user-pleasing software) and the same ability to sync your iTunes library, and that's about it. There's no on-board music store, although this Time review says a deal with Rhapsody is imminent. (No V Cast? That's no big loss.) And the BlackBerry app store isn't set to launch until March--the current iteration has only eight apps--which means you won't have any great musical add-ons like Shazam, Bloom, Finetune, OurStage, or JamBase.

Of course, if you want a smartphone with a touch screen, and you insist on using Verizon, you're probably going to buy one of these. In fact, you probably already have. But if you're a music fan, don't count on replacing your MP3 player with this particular phone.

A few days ago, I posted about Instinctiv's Shuffle application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It's an interesting piece of software that addresses a growing problem for some discerning listeners--how to get a meaningful playlist without having to program it song by song--but it only works on so-called "jailbroken" devices.

Instinctiv found Apple's iPhone SDK to be too restrictive for its needs.

(Credit: Apple)

Instinctiv's FAQ alluded to problems that made it impossible for it to use the iPhone software developer kit (SDK), but I was curious to hear more, and Monday I had a chance to talk with Instinctiv co-founders Justin Smithline and Peter Brodsky.

As Brodsky put it, "Apple's not really releasing an iPhone SDK." To paraphrase his explanation, the iPhone runs Mac OS X. Apple could simply have allowed developers to write applications to that platform--that's more or less how jailbroken apps work--and let the developers figure out how to distribute them. That's the traditional software development model.

Instead, Apple is trying assert tighter control over the iPhone by allowing only code-signed applications to run on it. The only way to get your application code-signed is by participating in Apple's iPhone Developer Program. Which requires--among other things--developers to use the new SDK.

Developers can download the SDK for free to see whether they're interested in applying to become an official iPhone developer. But Instinctiv says the SDK was useless to them because it doesn't provide a way for applications access the music library. (One of many restrictions it imposes.) According to the Instinctiv co-founders, this is not about protecting users from badly written apps--it's possible to write an "approved" app with the SDK that degrades performance on the iPhone--but is being done strictly for business reasons.

I'm not a developer and am not qualified to evaluate this claim. But even if it's correct, so what? Apple spent a lot of time and money creating the mobile phone that everybody wants, and absolutely should be able to control the user experience, enforce exclusive arrangements with its carrier partners, and extract fees from third-party application developers.

But this strategy works only as long as there's no viable competition. Right now, there are plenty of other mobile platforms that third-party developers can write applications for--Symbian (which Nokia recently bought in its entirety and turned open source), RIM's Blackberry, and Microsoft's Windows Mobile just to name three. But those platforms either have inherent flaws--the Windows Mobile UI comes to mind--or the devices they're used on don't have the combination of style and features that the iPhone is becoming known for.

Google's taking the opposite approach of Apple, building its Android mobile phone platform on open-source software such as Linux and promoting it heavily to third-party developers. Instinctiv is bullish on the platform, and has already designed a version of its Shuffle app for Android.

But I'm pretty skeptical about Android's chances of changing the world. When buying a phone, are consumers really looking for a large choice of applications? No. They're looking for a cool phone that does a few things very well, and a service provider that offers reasonable service in the widest possible range. The iPhone has the edge in hardware design, it has most of the features and applications that most people want, and while AT&T's service isn't perfect, neither is anybody else's. Android might have been great five years ago, going head to head against Symbian and Windows Mobile in their infancy. But competing against the iPhone's unified array of hardware+software+online services will be a tough task for any company.

Smartphone fans are excited about yesterday's announcement of the Blackberry 9000, aka Blackberry Bold, aka Research In Motion's iPhone killer. But Blackberry users are a different breed than iPhone users--the Blackberry's reason for existence is always-connected e-mail, and Blackberry users tend to be all business, afraid of being out of touch for even a moment. (An old friend in Washington D.C.--where Blackberry users are legion--had to make a vow after her third child was born not to check her e-mail after 6 p.m.)

Coming soon to the Blackberry: iTunes music syncrhonization.

(Credit: RIM)

So while the iPhone grew out of the iPod, and thus counts music playback as one of its primary features, the Blackberry Bold focuses more on its core communications features--e-mail, messaging, and telephony--as well as new physical improvements, like a bright color screen. You can see this focus in the first detailed hands-on review of the product at Crackberry.com, where media playback isn't even mentioned until part III (of IV) and gets no more than a paragraph. And 1GB of onboard memory isn't really enough for serious music listeners anyway, although it's expandable to 16GB.

But the clearest indication of all: while the 9000 might echo past Blackberries and ship with a Roxio application for organizing music on your PC and transferring it to your phone, RIM is also preparing a new application called Blackberry Media Sync that will let you use Apple's iTunes to transfer files to the phone. Of course, once you do get music onto the device, a relatively powerful internal stereo speaker system might actually make listening without headphones a reasonable option--sort of like the boombox of tomorrow. The iPhone's speakers are apparently not quite up to the task.

Still, for music fans in desperate need of a new phone--like me--the iPhone is still the most obvious choice, especially now that a 3G model is almost certainly on the way. But if you're already a Blackberry fan, or are primarily concerned with having access to e-mail at all times, the 9000 seems like the clearest alternative to the iPhone.

BlackBerry owners may be feeling like they have nothing to brag about now that the iPhone has added connectivity to Exchange e-mail systems--the BlackBerry's bread-and-butter feature.

Soon, BlackBerry users will have an over-the-air music download store designed just for them.

(Credit: Research In Motion)

Not to worry. By April, Blackberry owners will have something the iPhone still lacks--the ability to download songs over the air from any location with cellular access. Canadian company Puretracks, which has licensed more than two million songs from all four major labels and plenty of indies, announced plans to launch a mobile store for the BlackBerry family of devices in April.

The files will be in the AAC format used by iTunes, which offers higher quality at small file sizes than MP3. But unlike iTunes, none of the songs will be encumbered by DRM, allowing users to transfer them to as many computers as they like. Puretracks also promises to make a Wi-Fi enabled version of the store for BlackBerry devices with built-in Wi-Fi connectivity--a direct competitor to the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store. No word yet on download pricing.

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