“Beginning in the first half of next year, new Motorola mobile phones will be able to fetch songs from Apple Computer’s iTunes Music Store and play stereo-quality music. Using software developed by Apple, consumers will be able to transfer iTunes from their Windows or Macintosh computers via USB or Bluetooth connections,” Elizabeth Corcoran reports for Forbes.
[MacDailyNews Note: The new Motorola cellphones will ship with new Apple software, called iTunes Mobile Music.]
“Jobs [underscored] that Motorola’s phones would not compete with Apple’s iPods. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could take a dozen of your favorite songs with you’ on your cell phone, Jobs told the crowd. Apple’s iPods store hundreds of hours of music,” Corcoran reports. “Although iTunes will be the default jukebox on future Motorola phones, the deal is not an exclusive partnership.” Full article here.
The custom version of iTunes jukebox software that will run on Motorola’s handsets “will not initially be able to preview, buy and download songs over the air directly from the iTunes Music Store. Instead, users will have to download tracks on a PC or Mac then transfer them to the phone using a Bluetooth or USB link, but that’s probably the best solution until much higher data throughputs become available over cellular networks,” Tony Smith reports for The Register.
“HP’s own-brand iPod is expected to ship in September, but – barring other deals, of course – Motorola’s handsets will become the first devices not produced by Apple to support the Mac maker’s DRM technology, FairPlay,” Smith reports. “In short, this is a very significant deal that eclipses all of those done by ITMS’ rivals so far, and represents a real a win-win partnership for Apple.” Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Seems that just as Motorola is free to add other music services along with iTunes, Apple is free to pursue deals with other cell phone makers. This partnership marks Apple’s first license of their proprietary Fairplay DRM to another company. “We think Motorola is the ideal partner [with which] to kick this off,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs stated in the press release.
Look for future announcements.
[UPDATED 9:20AM to include quotes from The Register and denote Apple’s Fairplay licensing in the article’s headline and MDN take.]
To MDN – and a riff on Less is More’s comment above…
If comments posted on this site are going to be edited or deleted, at the very least, please:
1) Leave the gray bar up indicating who made the post and when
2) Put a [Deleted] tag or note or some other sort of comment where the post was located.
3) If the post is altered rather than deleted, you should indicate what was changed by a different color or put [text deleted] in place of specific content that was changed.
To do less, and incur the wrath of regular posters who find that even an occasional comment, however thoughtless or inconsiderate or off topic, have been deleted or altered, would likely be inviting a catastrophically fatal blow to this site. Since there are no specified guidelines or restrictions for posting (that I have found), there should be no tampering with what folks choose to post. And don’t think that this kind of behaviour, if it persists, will go unnoticed or uncommented upon.
The title of the article is flat out wrong and misleading. MDN, as well as most of the posters here, has it all wrong.
Apple is not licensing Fairplay or Quicktime to Moto, but rather: Apple is providing a software application, tenatively called “iTunes Mobile Music” that can play Fairplay encoded AAC tracks on a new-generation mobile phone. This is no less different than what Apple has done with iTunes for Windows (implying so would mean that M$ has a license for Fairplay and QT).
To say that Apple has licensed Fairplay or QT to Moto would imply that Moto would be able to use these technologies in derivative products (like a PDA, for example), not just cell phones. This is simply not the case here.
And to the posters who think this would lead to iTunes for Linux: dream on….it ain’t gonna happen.
You people need to get off the crunch and your head outta the clouds….
the only way to play AAC Fairplay songs is by using QT technology. that’s why it’s bundled with iTunes for Windows.
That’s true, so I suppose whatever the Motorola phones use�could be considered QT-based even if only for the DRM. I was originally thinking it would be similar to the iPod which (AFAIK) doesn’t implement QT; the audio decoding is done by the PortalPlayer chip.
Wouldn’t it be funny if one of these Motorola cellphones was eventually powered by an embedded… G4 derivative?
great. so not only do I have a burning lap from my powerbook, now I have a scorched face from my cell phone? No thanks!
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