Mobile Phone - Convergence Point For iPod, Others?

Nagen writes "DrunkenBlog has an intriguing essay arguing that the mobile phone is the primary convergence point for digital devices and will soon cause iPod sales to evaporate. Perhaps more interesting is the idea that the iPod is an expendable pawn in a larger battle of who will control the gateway of all legal content to the user."

I wonder what happend to Zayante?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple acquired [apple.com] Zayante Inc. over two years ago. Zayante was known to demo wireless FireWire at the time.

I wonder if they are going to include that technology to AirPort Express.

Unless Apple is part of the deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Motorola is supposed to be selling an "iTunes compatible" phone by early 2005.

Here [cnn.com]

and here. [reuters.com]

Maybe RTFA

[theolein]

I am surprised that everybody and his mother read the words convergence and phone without reading to the end of the article. The guy is making less of a point that Apple wants to sell iTunes on phones than he is about Apple selling music and video over computers, phones and other nifty little gadgets such as Airport express. He is making the case for Apple controlling the DRM content through convergence of devices such as phones, Airport express and computers.

It's a fine but important difference.

Re:May I be the first to say: Duh!

[mothz]

I wonder if they're planning to actually build a cellphone.

Not if they paid attention in high school economics class. There's almost no profit [slashdot.org] in manufacturing cell phones, and when that happens, firms are supposed to leave the market, not enter it.

Re:One thing I promise you...

[Grishnakh]

There's two other factors making the USA different from other places:

1) all the networks use different technologies (CDMA, GSM, TDMA) and/or different frequency bands, so it's generally not possible to use phones on competitors' networks. This doesn't look like it's likely to change any time soon.

2) USA has far more land area and far less population density than Europe, so coverage is a lot more difficult outside of metro areas.

Re:One thing I promise you...

[grrrl]

Not to burst your bubble but have you compared the square miles of The United States of America to that of the UK?

have you compared the US to australia? we have very good coverage in all major cities and extended cdma coverage in the bush - ok so it doesnt cover the whole continent but people dont live over the whole continent like they do in the us (in the us protion of nth america). with the # of people in the US it *does* seem backward that better services arent in place.

Pods are popular but guess what? Most people over 50 don't own them and would never purchase one-the same folks that comprise 2/3rds of the GDP and don't want to be on the Internet.

do you have any basis for this argument? I know a *lot* of over 50s who are on the internet, and quite a few who have ipods! my dad spends hours ripping his cds in itunes to build up his music library

but unless Telcos are challenged with losing customer bases at alarming rates to outside competitors they don't move to improve services for customers. It just doesn't make sense to them to give new services if customers aren't canceling accounts.

now this i agree with - here in little old oz we have the major player telstra, and their mobile (and home!) plans get worse and worse, but people keep coming back and signing up new plans to get the phones, while dropping the features (like offpeak rates, per second billing, free chat, reduced sms etc)
some of the other mobile providers have better services but crap coverage and delays between carriers (nothing like getting sms's 3 days late!) - so the migration is slow

coming back to the mobile phone feature issue though, i think people *will* buy mobile phones with more features, but only because they get them for free with a new plan when their "old" (usually i think phones with flash cards are the way to go, but they will never surpass the ipod because they will never do *everything* well - like pictures for example - who cares??? i have a few photos of friends so their faces come up when it rings but its so low quality its just a gimik. i will never want to look at photos on my phone, and the interface will never be as good as the ipod for music (the more i use my new nokia the more i wish i could get rid of half the menu options!)

Big difference in market penetration

[Jadrano]

Mobile phone use is about the same in America as it is in Europe.

I don't know if there are statistics about actual mobile phone use (many people in Europa carry their mobile phone around, but don't telephone very often), but there is a big difference in market penetration. 2002 data about mobile phone penetration from http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techres earch/pdfs/2003TMT.pdf [morganstanley.com]
Sweden 89%, Finland 86%, Italy, Portugal and Hong Kong 85%, Spain, Ireland and Czech Republic 84%, Austria and UK 82%, Netherlands 79%, Switzerland 78%, Denmark and Norway 77%, Singapore 73%, Germany 72%, Hungary 68%, South Korea 67%, France 65%, Japan 62%, ...
US 50%