Apple phone home
If Sony, Creative, HP, and company can’t seem to slow the iPod jaugernaut, maybe Nokia, LG, and Samsung can. Earlier this month, ABI Research cited the possibility of 4-gigabyte hard drives in mobile phones rendering the portable MP3 player obsolete.
“As the cellular handset becomes the one device that the world carries, the standalone MP3 player may well be left behind,” says Alan Varghese, ABI Research’s principal analyst of wireless semiconductor research. “What’s important to many users is having one device that handles mobile music as well as the other functions—phone calls, digital photography, email, web browsing—now performed by mobile phones.
Intersting point. I need to carry a phone, but choose to carry an iPod.
Only two things stand in the way of this outcome. The ingenuity of the MP3 player designers, especially Apple, and the really awful marketing track record of mobile carriers.
It’s not so secret that Apple’s working on some sort of wireless communication device. The patents have been applied for, and the rumors have been flying. If Sony or Apple were to design the ultimate mobile phone, it surely would bypass the mobile carriers’ online music (and video) services.
There’s evidence that consumers would prefer such an outcome. Strategy Analytics reports that mobile carriers price their music offerings 100% to 150% beyond what consumers are willing to pay. The report notes customers are willing to pay a 35% premium for access to their tunes on a wireless device. Sony and Apple would happily take that… after you buy their phone.
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