Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Music streaming for smartphones

Srivats Sampath, Mercora CEO said it here "The next generation of music players is going to be a phone. It's not going to be a dedicated device" and I would agree with him, but for it to be a success, this "next generation"music player and phone must work nicely together and alone as well... the current devices out there that are phone/music-media players are just ok..either the music player part only works with a certain software, or you need a certain headset, not all formats are supported, etc or the phone part which is what makes this special completely sucks- bad reception, crashes, etc etc.. what makes M by mercora semi-special in my eye is that it lets you subscribe to 100,000 Internet radio stations...these streams work on phones operating on 3G and higher mobile networks, like Edge, EVDO, HSPDA and Wi-Fi, ...M only works with smartphones that run on windows mobile 5.0 and these smartphones arent that widely used here in the US by the same people that would be interested in streaming music..so its a tough and small market..especially when only a handfull of phones sold by carriers here in the US have 3G, EDGE or WiFi capabilities.. one thing I wonder and would like to see its services and manufacturers paying more attention to open source mobile OS such as linux and symbian ...even though there are a few things about M that I dont like such as
  1. Runs on windows Mobile 5.0 only
  2. Only accepts WMA, MP3 or Ogg Vorbis formatted files, No AAC support (songs bought on iTunes cant play)
  3. there is a fee of $4.99 (not bad if it the top 2 minuses were not listed)
its still good to see new companies pushing the envelope and shaking things up with MS, apple and yahoo which is why I posted about M and the cnet article, I myself would not use the service for a few reasons, (I dont have MS mobile 5.0 phone, or would pay to stream music when the nokia e61 has an application that does this for free). As you see its not perfect for the reasons I stated earlier and until someone comes up with something that is "standard" or works accross the board we will be seeing alot of failures such as the motorola-Cingular Rockr, and/or other phones that will attempt to do the same like the music oriented nokia N series or the sony ericsson's walkman series

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