iPhone from NTT DoCoMo?

[gopher]

http://www.onlinereporter.com/charts.../tor327.html#2

say the following:

Apple Strikes Major Blow in Streaming Media Market; Lands QuickTime Deal With Japan's DoCoMo



Japan's leading cell phone carrier NTT DoCoMo, generally recognized as the most technologically innovative of all the world's wireless telephone providers, has picked Apple's QuickTime 6 to be its audio and video platform for future mobile phones. To implement QuickTime 6 on cell phones, Apple will introduce a modified version of the stuff this year that supports the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard. 3GPP is based on the open MPEG-4 standard for encoding, decoding and transmitting digital video and audio to PCs, cell phones, set-top boxes and other wired and wireless Internet-connected devices. Besides being known for pushing the tech envelope, DoCoMo has 44 million subscribers in Japan making it one of the world's largest cell phone service providers.

Click on the link above for more...sounds very much like how the iPhone might become a reality.

[Kid Red]

iPhone is an iApp, not a real phone. These companies working QT into their phones will allow iPhone to work with different models.

[gopher]

Nobody really knows what iPhone is except Apple. How do you know it won't be a telephone hookup to an iPod? iPod isn't an iApp, yet it works with an iApp. I suspect that somewhere in that news is a hint of what the iPhone will be like in the future.

[yamadataro]

I always thought that iPhone would be a hardware. Did I miss some articles in the last couple of months? Never heard of iPhone as an application.

I'm under the impression that this MPEG4 deal is strictly a software licencing, althought I could be wrong.

As to the DoCoMo iPhone, DoCoMo never allows phone manufacturers to put their logo on the DoCoMo phones. Which means Apple can not sell a phone device under their own brand. DoCoMo logo is the only one that can be on it even if it's Sony or Panasonic (although the manufacturers of each handset are generally known). You can never find the manufacturer's name on the phone/manuals and nowhere! It wouldn't make sense to sell them without Apple logo on them. DoCoMo sells any product, including even Sun Micro's Cobalt Cube server, as DoCoMo product.

Anyway, Japanese cell market is very closed to overseas handset manufacturers and Japanese mobile phone providers strictly keep their own cell system which is not compatible with any other countries'. Very stupid. I remember Handspring's attempt to realize a DoCoMo branded organizer phone but it didn't succeed.

I'm very very curious what Apple would do if they'd actually release a phone device in Japan as well as otheri countries worldwide.

[Megaquad]

Mobile phone industry is going through fast evolution all the time.
I dont think Apple has resources or will to be "up-to-date" all the time.
They would get squashed, it's not their style.

It's same like what Apple did with digital cameras, they aren't making them but they made it possible to easy interact with macs, especially for home users.

I think Apple is trying to do the same with mobile phones.