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Motorola's iTunes Phone - This Week?

Anybody else hoping that Apple baits Motorola along, promising features and performance and delivering stop-gaps right at the time Motorola is about to abandon them as a supplier but never actually meeting their roadmap?
 
wileypen said:
I don't get it. Apple's not making big bucks on the songs - the money's in the ipods. So they're going to make it easy for people not to carry ipods - because everyone's got a phone.
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And I TRULY don't get it. I can't think of anything I'd have less chance of buying than a cell phone (which drives me and others NUTZ) and doubly, a cell phone I'd have to have screwed to my ear with some lousy headphones. This is just dumb.
 
 
fatfish said:
Dream on

Apple are making a tidy sum from iTMS now I would guess, but nowhere near your calculations and your predictions are also rather ambitious.
Video is a long way off.
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I'm not dreaming. Ringtones are a $5 billion annual business *today*. You don't think music downloads will be twice that within 3 years or so?

According to *Apple* they are making 12 cents per song (gross). This was a figure given at the beginning. You don't think economies of scale and decreased bandwidth/equipment costs hasn't raised that? Not much granted, but I'm only talking pennies.

Analysts are predicting on a range of 600 million to 1 billion downloads this year, thus I said, "*as much as* $100 million" (as in gross to Apple).

The HE-AAC spec has been finalized and Apple is expected to implement the codec in QuickTime very soon. How they implement it has yet to be determined, they could bill their service as better quality and remain at 128kbps, or they could keep the same quality and bump down to a lower bitrate, thus lowering bandwidth/server costs. This combined with more economy of scale and overall reduction in bandwidth and equipment costs could easily increase the gross margin by 50% to up to 18 cents per song...though again, I'm talking upper bounds.

With music downloads being twice that of current ringtone revenues that exist today, Apple could *easily* be grossing $1 billion assuming that they continue to dominate the market...thus the incentive to look at music as a profit center. And as I said before, this becomes even more possible with sales from indie artists where the gross margin could be *much* higher.

The only other numbers I gave was for the number of iPods...Steve Jobs held up the 10 millionth iPod at MacWorld SF. Analysts are predicting, as far as I've seen, up to 30 million to be sold this year. Assuming significantly less than that, and only 20 million are sold this year (a figure *below* what analysts are saying) and we have 30 million iPods...and this is what I said as been a "soon to be number".

As far as video being a long way off...

I really don't think so. Video content is extremely popular *today*, albeit illegal content. People are download full length DVDs *today*. And this is with mostly obsolete codecs. H.264 which is included with QuickTime 7 and will be included with Tiger, will seriously change everything. The technology is here, it is currently being used by many people illegally. The technology is about to be vastly improved...does any of this sound familiar? It should, because these are the same conditions that were present when Apple launched iTMS. I don't suppose you've noticed Apple already offers free music videos at iTMS, albeit with codecs that totally pale in comparison to H.264.

Now I'm not expecting Apple to announce video services tomorrow or anything, all along I've been talking about what the picture will look like 3 years from now. BUT, the time to start planning and acting upon that near term future is now, and it begins for Apple by thinking about the iTMS as a significant revenue generator...which is exactly what they're doing with this Motorola move.
 
I really hope this phone is a) good b) out soon.

I am worried that the artificial limits that are rumored to the music storage space will kill this device. It should be a phone shuffle combo to make serious market share.
 
I've never bought a Motorola phone, and I doubt this will get me to purchase one.

Maybe I am missing something, but unless these phones can hold a boat load of music, I'm sticking with my iPod. Sure, I would love to have one device for both, but I suspect this will fall short. Maybe a few years down the road.
 
Phone don't compete with iPods, but with iPod shuffles.

BWhaler said:
Maybe I am missing something, but unless these phones can hold a boat load of music, I'm sticking with my iPod. Sure, I would love to have one device for both, but I suspect this will fall short. Maybe a few years down the road.
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Phones won't compete with iPods, not this year or next anyway. Where it fits in is as an ancillary when you don't want your iPod with you - when you're only bringing a little tiny handbag or when there just isn't space in your jeans for iPod and phone. I'm not sure I or my wife would buy a phone just for the iTunes function, but if it had bluetooth and a decent Java implementation as well, and if it wasn't too expensive as an upgrade? It would certainly win in a tie-break with another phone.
 
The obvious thing would be an updated A1000 with iTunes. If that was the case, you'd then expect to be able to run iTunes on any Symbian phone, which would be nice
 
puckhead193 said:
I hope that it will work with verizon, i hope it looks good like apple products
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ditto, thats my one of two concerns (1) haveing bluetooth and (2) works with verizon.
 
The new RAZR Pro 3G-phone that moto released today does have support for AAC, MPEG4, WMV, WMA, MP3. Think that could be it? (yuk .. wma)

pic12819.jpeg
 
Poff said:
The new RAZR Pro 3G-phone that moto released today does have support for AAC, MPEG4, WMV, WMA, MP3. Think that could be it? (yuk .. wma)

pic12819.jpeg
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Where did you find this? Nothing on Motorola website yet
 
Motorola + iSynch + Bluetooth = barf

Motorola phones iSynch only over USB cables. No blue-tooth iSynching. I wouldn't bother with another Motorola phone until they (Moto or Apple?) deal with that one. USB works, of course, but it's frigging annoying.
 
boringName said:
Motorola phones iSynch only over USB cables. No blue-tooth iSynching. I wouldn't bother with another Motorola phone until they (Moto or Apple?) deal with that one. USB works, of course, but it's frigging annoying.
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You can thank Verizon for that!
 
boringName said:
Motorola phones iSynch only over USB cables. No blue-tooth iSynching. I wouldn't bother with another Motorola phone until they (Moto or Apple?) deal with that one. USB works, of course, but it's frigging annoying.
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Search the forums - people have got Motorola phones to iSync with Macs, seems a hassle, though. There is a rumour that Tiger will put this right.

Surely if a new phone has iTunes it will be Mac compatible...
 
They iSynch fine - over the USB cable. I've done LOTS of searching but haven't been able to get it working over bluetooth with my V551 (nice phone, otherwise). If anyone actually knows how, I'd love to know.

We shouldn't have to "make it work," though. I, too, am hoping Tiger will address the issue... If it doesn't, I'll be buying the $5/mo insurance policy and accidentally throwing the phone at the wall as hard as I can.
 
boringName said:
They iSynch fine - over the USB cable. I've done LOTS of searching but haven't been able to get it working over bluetooth with my V551 (nice phone, otherwise). If anyone actually knows how, I'd love to know.

We shouldn't have to "make it work," though. I, too, am hoping Tiger will address the issue... If it doesn't, I'll be buying the $5/mo insurance policy and accidentally throwing the phone at the wall as hard as I can.
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I've been looking at the A1000 phone and people have got that to work with Bluetooth. Even so, I'm loath to buy one without being certain it'll Bluetooth sync without hassle. Which is why I'm keen to see what this new phone is like...
 
Philsy said:
Thanks - that looks a nice phone. It's a shame 3G phones have to be so large, though, but I guess that'll change in time.
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The same size as the Razr V3? I wouldn't exactly call that large, but I guess it depends what you compare it to..
 
Poff said:
The same size as the Razr V3? I wouldn't exactly call that large, but I guess it depends what you compare it to..
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OK, sorry, didn't realise it was the same size - that's not bad. Most 3Gs I've looked at have been larger than I'd want.
 
wileypen said:
I don't get it. Apple's not making big bucks on the songs - the money's in the ipods. So they're going to make it easy for people not to carry ipods - because everyone's got a phone. No matter how small the shuffle is (and I love mine), it's still an extra device you have to haul around. And, hey, the cell phone will probably tell you what song is playing...
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You don't think Apple's letting Motorola do this for free, do you? Apple will make money (royalties) on the phone sales. They will make more money on iTMS. Since Apple doesn't appear to want to go into the phone business, it looks like it's a win-win for them.
 
Poff said:
The new RAZR Pro 3G-phone that moto released today does have support for AAC, MPEG4, WMV, WMA, MP3. Think that could be it? (yuk .. wma)

pic12819.jpeg
Click to expand...

I like the design but that maroon color *NEEDS* to go
 
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