The Motorola ITunes Phone

From Digital Music News:

Motorola Jumps on iTunes Phone:  Motorola may have taken the cake Thursday at CES, unwrapping an iTunes-compatible phone. The new mobile device mirrors the functionality of an iPod, syncing digital music collections and borrowing key user interface aspects. Motorola EVP Ron Garriques strutted the phone in front of a packed audience, demonstrating the device as just one of many upcoming, music-focused devices. But Garriques stopped short of offering a live date for the mobile sensation, though most now expect the device to drop within a month. For Garriques, the mobile revolution is ready to behead the web, with the executive pointing to a future when "the internet is no longer visible, and the PC is a peripheral".

While I whole-heartedly agree with that last sentence I can't quite see why people would buy 99cents music downloads on a cell phone / mobile music device, any more than they are / rather - are not - buying it on ITunes - as a gimmick for the first couple of times, yes, but after that... I don't think so. 99cents for SOME tracks, ok, but for every track? For the price of 10 tracks I could subscribe to Sirius of XM for th entire month - and now I can even freeze / time-sift (!!) 6 hours of music, as well. ITunes will find itself outmoded by subscriptions services, tethered download models, and radio-meets-download services.

But then again, neither Apple nor Motorola are about the MUSIC (sorry), they are about selling hardware -- their stuff. Guess where most music on those devices will come from - you guessed it: limewire, bit-torrent, edonkey et al, plus stream-rippers and transcoders will have a field day.

The bottom line: great stuff, Apple + Motorola (and btw, Apple Computer: I just made the switch of using both Macs and PCs) - but where's the economic killer app for the USER?