“Verizon Wireless plans to release of a mobile phone with a design that resembles the iPod, according to a report published Monday,” CNNMoney reports.

“The ‘Chocolate’ cellphone will be available Aug. 7 and will only be available to Verizon customers, the Wall Street Journal said. Customers with a one-year contract can expect to pay $249 for the phone, the newspaper reported,” CNNMoney reports. “‘Verizon’s model seems to be going after Apple and iTunes more than anything else we’ve seen,’ Linda Barrabee, a wireless analyst at Yankee Group, told the newspaper.”

Full article here.

“The new phone has a ‘look and feel’ like an iPod, though without the signature click wheel. The phone has limited storage capacity, but an attachable drive can hold as many as 1,000 songs, and will be part of a $100 package that includes headphones and a cable to sync songs to a computer,” Mick Weinstein reports for SeekingAlpha. “Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer commented in the last conference call: ‘[w]e do not think that the phones that are available today make the best music players…We think the iPod is. But over time, that is likely to change, and we are not sitting around doing nothing.’ Dean Bubley lays out the numbers showing Apple still has a huge lead over music-phones, even in nations where music-phone adoption is far ahead of the U.S.”

Full article here.