Digital Noise: Music and Tech

Back in January, I criticized Palm for not having a reasonable music strategy for the upcoming Pre, the touch-screen superphone that could save the company. At that time, I mocked Palm for suggesting that consumers would have to drag and drop music files from their PC to the Pre, which would appear as a mass storage device. As I wrote, "without iTunes, there's no iPhone. And without the iPhone, there's no consumer smartphone audience." (Users will also be able to buy downloads over the air with an Amazon MP3 client, but the vast majority of music on portable devices comes from the user's computer, not downloads.)

Why reinvent the wheel?

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

It looks like Palm took my criticism to heart: Thursday at the D7: All Things D conference, the company demonstrated the Pre and announced that its media sync capability would be built around...iTunes. That's right: when you plug the phone into your computer and hit the "media sync" button, it will launch iTunes and begin letting you transfer any DRM-free files to the phone. You'll still be able use iTunes to rip and store and organize your music, to sync it with any iPods you have, and to buy downloads. Why try to reinvent the wheel and risk disaster? Heck, why not go all the way and let iPhone applications run on the thing as well?

There's only one problem: what if Apple decides that it doesn't want a competitor using the software it built and developed? Could Apple force Palm into the sort of arms race that RealNetworks experienced when it tried to reverse-engineer iTunes' DRM scheme?

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Most of Microsoft's announcements Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona were leaked weeks ago, so there weren't any big surprises.

Now where the heck's the Zune icon on this thing?

(Credit: Microsoft)

There's a new mobile OS, Windows Mobile 6.5, that's supposed to be friendlier than the notoriously clunky earlier versions. (ZDNet's mobile maven Matthew Miller is still disappointed.)

There's a set of cloud-based services for synchronizing data like contacts and photos. (Although apparently v.1 will not be connected with the Windows Live or Live Mesh platforms or services, so the vision of unified data sync across devices is still a whiteboard drawing as far as Microsoft products and services are concerned.)

There's a marketplace for Windows Mobile apps. There's a brand change--the phones will be called "Windows Phones," although the OS is still "Windows Mobile." (Confused?) Oh, and the company has finally acknowledged that competing in the consumer space is important, a year and a half after CEO Steve Ballmer dismissed the iPhone as a "$500 subsidized item" that had "no chance" of gaining any significant market share.

Assuming that any of this makes you want to run out and buy a Windows Mobile phone, too bad. None of it's available until late this year.

I'll give Microsoft some credit for envisioning and beginning to build a free alternative to Apple's MobileMe service. And the mobile marketplace is a no-brainer. But Monday's announcements just underscore that Microsoft has no answer to the iPhone.

Palm's Pre won CNET's Best of CES award for 2009, and is getting tons of love from around the tech world.

Not a bad accomplishment for a smartphone with a completely new operating system, from a company written off as dead not long ago.

Cool smartphone, but will it replace your MP3 player?

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/ CBS Interactive)

I wrote something like this about RIM's BlackBerry Storm and got some heat for it, but still...where's the music?

I don't mean that the Pre won't play music--of course it will. Palm even announced a deal with Amazon.com to let users buy music downloads without any intervention (cooperation? interference?) from the carrier, Sprint.

But let's recap why the iPhone became the first smartphone to capture the consumer imagination. Sure, its design had a lot of pleasant "just works" surprises, from the bright touch screen to the way the keypad autocorrects for big fingers. But a large reason is because Apple branded it as an extension of the iPod, which has become synonymous with mobile music.

When music fans were looking to consolidate from two devices (MP3 player, phone) to a single one, the "i" brand reassured them that they wouldn't get a second-class music experience.

Equally important: iTunes, the software with which every iPod user was already familiar. It's not perfect. I know people who hate it, particularly on the PC. But compare it with the proposed Pre experience, as covered by PC Magazine:

9.) How do you get music and video onto the Pre?

You can drag and drop it over from your PC using USB mass storage, or buy songs on the device using a built-in Amazon MP3 Store client.

My immediate reaction upon reading those three little words, "drag and drop"? Yecch. No sync? No library? No rating system? No playlists, preset or automatic? No way to view and change information about songs?

Here's the thing: without iTunes, there's no iPhone. And without the iPhone, there's no consumer smartphone audience. I don't doubt that Palm (and RIM, for that matter) understand mobile communications and information management, and there's certainly a lot of room for improvement in business phones. But if I'm going to replace my MP3 player with a phone, these phones won't cut it.

That's why Microsoft's recent justification for the Zune--it helped the company learn how to build music management software and an online store--didn't ring as false to me as it did to some other folks.

The device might be a failure. But whenever Microsoft rolls out its next-generation mobile-phone platform, at least it has a reasonable story for managing and buying music.

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