Cell phones take iPod challenge

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mates that $4.1 billion was spent worldwide last year on ring tones and ring tunes, which are snippets of music that people use to replace phone rings. The record industry has taken note.

"All the labels are very focused on the mobile space," Scott Hochgesang, executive vice president of the Universal Music Group, said at a recent conference in San Francisco. "We may have been a bit slow to things happening on the Internet, but we won't do that again."

Beyond the tones
Getting the pricing right for music on cell phones can be a headache. Vodafone charges about $2.75 for each song, and in Japan, carrier KDDI plans to launch a service this month that will offer wirelessly downloadable songs for between $2 and $3. That compares with the 99-cent price per song at Apple's iTunes and other PC-based download stores. In addition, the cost of downloaded tunes is easily comparable to the cost of buying a CD.

Labels are loath to price cell phone songs at much less, though. And people have been paying $2 to $3 apiece for ring tones and ring tunes without considerable protest, in part because there is nothing to compare them with off the phone.

Network capacity is also an issue. According to Musiwave's Babinet, the new Vodafone service compresses music in the AACPlus format, which creates files far smaller than an equivalent-sounding MP3 file. On a true 3G network, this can start playing after about five seconds, or about 15 seconds on the slower broadband networks used by American companies offering cell phone data services.

For the most part, European and Asian carriers are further ahead in moving to networks with true 3G capacity. U.S. carriers are slowly upgrading their networks, and new projects, such as a Qualcomm-sponsored 3G content network geared to video and music, are also under way.

Digital rights management is another concern. Record labels hope to avoid the trading of mobile downloads between phones or over PC-based peer-to-peer networks.

An early version of a standard for managing digital rights was created by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) industry group, but a second, stronger version is now gaining some popularity. Some labels eager to dip their toes in the music download waters are turning to proprietary rights management software that isn't compatible with OMA standards.

"There are a tremendous number of digital rights management issues that remain," said Thomas Gewecke, senior vice president of business development at Sony Music.

In the United States, some labels point to the lack of phones that can handle full music as the hold-up in the cell phone market. Some appropriate devices from Motorola and other companies have come to market in recent months, but they remain rare, and they often have little storage capacity.

Growing consumer awareness of music could make the feature as popular as cameras on cell phones and could break the logjam soon, enabling the United States to move more quickly along Europe's path, some labels predict.

"I think this may well be a year when consumers demand what they're not getting," EMI Group spokeswoman Jeanne Meyer said.

Mobile Phone ?

how could you call a box that download and play AAC plus songs a PHONE ?
There is actually no really big differences between an Ipod and a "phone".

Ipod will have download capacity (one day)and phones will have HDD (Samsung)
I think the only good answer is how much electronic stuffs you would like in your pockets ? Every smart boy find the "PMC I-do-one-thing-great-multi-device" approach sexy but the fact is you won't like to carry many little devices if you can have one.
In the LONG-TERM Swiss Army multi-fonctions knife WILL WIN (moore's law and fuel cells) because all functions are targeted to our eyes and ears.

Let's look at Vodafone site to see the famous personal communicator : it is a computer !

By the way, Motorola has stopped talking about "phone" because their new products are not these ones.

Mobile Phone ?

how could you call a box that download and play AAC plus songs a PHONE ?
There is actually no really big differences between an Ipod and a "phone".

Ipod will have download capacity (one day)and phones will have HDD (Samsung)
I think the only good answer is how much electronic stuffs you would like in your pockets ? Every smart boy find the "PMC I-do-one-thing-great-multi-device" approach sexy but the fact is you won't like to carry many little devices if you can have one.
In the LONG-TERM Swiss Army multi-fonctions knife WILL WIN (moore's law and fuel cells) because all functions are targeted to our eyes and ears.

Let's look at Vodafone site to see the famous personal communicator : it is a computer !

By the way, Motorola has stopped talking about "phone" because their new products are not these ones.

[Yuzer_Nayme]

Phones is phones

And cameras is cameras ... once they each do what they do perfectly, THEN can we start worrying about combining them?

[Yuzer_Nayme]

Phones is phones

And cameras is cameras ... once they each do what they do perfectly, THEN can we start worrying about combining them?