“Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB will unveil a mobile phone-cum-digital music player early next month, company President Miles Flint announced at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes on Monday. The phone will carry a name which has already appeared on some 350 million music players over the last 25 years, he said: the Walkman brand of Sony Ericsson’s parent company, Sony,” Peter Sayer reports for Digit.
“It will play open music file formats such as MP3 and AAC (Advanced Audio Coding), according to Rikko Sakaguchi, Sony Ericsson’s head of product and application planning. Sony Ericsson will unveil the phone next month, and will go on to exhibit it at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, which opens March 10, Sakaguchi said,” Sayer reports.
“To be a success, the music phone must make it easy to browse, select and play music, Flint said. ‘And it has to have fantastic sound quality,’ one of Sony’s strengths, he said… Flint expects that, at first, people will rip their own CDs and copy them to the phone, but Sony Ericsson will also work with Sony’s Connect online music store to provide a music download service for the phone… He was tight-lipped about further details, though,” Sayer reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hmmmm, this phone will support AAC (Advanced Audio Coding – .m4a – or MPEG-4 Audio), just like Apple’s iTunes application (Apple iTunes Music Store sells songs in the protected AAC format – .m4p – using Apple’s FairPlay DRM). There’s no information about whether or not this phone would be able to play FairPlay-protected AAC files, but it seems that, at the very least, it would be able to play any unprotected AAC file that iTunes could rip from a CD. Is it mere coincidence or a hint of something else to come?
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Nokia to use Microsoft’s music formats on its handsets – February 14, 2005
Motorola unveils ‘Apple iTunes phone’ – February 14, 2005
This is great news! Take that, Nokia. Welcome to the right side of the war, Sony.
normally this would not be a big deal ’cause all the other phone manufacturers already support AAC. but considering that Sony’s own online store does not support that format and the other rumors flying around this morning…
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MDN Editor: How am I supposed to get my props for my First Post® when you keep editing it out? Uncool, dude. I only get a few minutes for recess between periods, so getting First Post® is a big deal for me.
you’re not.
Control your spasms, Mac zealots. As Apple’s AAC page states:
AAC was developed by the MPEG group that includes Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony, and Nokia—companies that have also been involved in the development of audio codecs such as MP3 and AC3 (also known as Dolby Digital).
So Sony already had skin in the game. Using AAC doesn’t imply at all that Sony will have anything to do with iTunes.
Sound the Walkman’s death knell now. No WMA support? Good luck with that. Everyone knows that the Microsoft DRM® is the future. Compliance is mandatory.
Sony not choosing to support WMA is the bigger, unspoken story here. Openly supporting AAC and not even mentioning WMA is another shot across Micrsoft’s bow. Fire in the hole!
Uh, my Sony Ericsson K700i already plays AAC files. It doesn’t however, play protected AAC files. When THAT happens, then this announcement will be real news…
“Control your spasms, Mac zealots. As Apple’s AAC page states:
AAC was developed by the MPEG group that includes Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony, and Nokia—companies that have also been involved in the development of audio codecs such as MP3 and AC3 (also known as Dolby Digital).
So Sony already had skin in the game. Using AAC doesn’t imply at all that Sony will have anything to do with iTunes.
So, why was Sony using the ATRAC format for their online music service?
Not that using AAC is directly related to iTunes, but comparing H.264 as being a DV video standard (which is Quicktime 7), then you can see the excitement that AAC as an audio standard is more exciting for us “Mac zealots” than WMA.
The more AAC files there are, the more ubiquitous the format is, leaving the non-forward thinking companies to rust.
BAD NEWS for Gorog !!!!!
if sony is all about top quality music why did they invent atrac3? it’s cack
Sony. What a joke. Myyyy, how the once-mighty have fallen. Yessss. It’s typical of an organization like Sony to use a backdoor approach to throwing in the towel and conceding victory to Apple. I mean, Sony’s grown accustomed to GETTING it in the back door for a long time now thanks to the iPod. Come on, Sony. You know you love it. Especially bent over like that. Hey, I keed, I keed. But seriously, maybe a better name for the iPod would’ve been the iPoke, at least in Sony’s case! Apple’s really rammed it up there good, eh Sony!?! Are you sore yet? Sounds like it. Nooooo, I keed.
Okay . . . not this time.
Well, where this is useful is that, at least someday, it gives the potential capability of playing iTunes-encoded music. Remember that once you strip off the FairPlay, you have AAC-encoded audio. If Sony decides they want to support iTMS, and Apple lets them, they’ve done the heavy lifting of being able to play the audio and all they need to do is get the code to strip-off FairPlay from Apple.
Of course, whether Apple will let them is another story…
The new Sony Connect, powered by iTunes…
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I second the opinions of me, g%, and the Crunge.
That Sony is not supporting WMA is a kick in Microsoft’s kneekaps. That Sony not supporting its own ATRAC format is is a kick in its own kneecaps.
Sony keeps forgetting to leverage its different businesses. Just take the fact that the Columbia House Music Club *never* sold Sony’s own pre-recorded mini-discs. And now Sony fails to support it own digital-only format. Trying to avoid lost sales of the original Walkman cassette/CD players has been costly to Sony the way the entrenchment of legacy applications in the enterprise keeps Microsoft from progressing. (Let’s not give them the dignity of calling it innovating, shall we?)
The general support of MPEG-4 in its players is a good thing, though, and further enhances Apple’s position. Then maybe journalists will stop saying AAC is an Apple proprietory format and point to the DRM as the issue instead.
Plus, the more players out there support the format will hopefully someday enable us to ditch MP3 altogether.
Doesn’t it make sense for Apple to license it’s technology to ALL makers of mobile phones?
The have a patent for that nifty scroll wheel. Wouldn’t it be really useful on a mobile phone, too, instead of those pesky buttons and barely useful joysticks? I think it’s a lot easier to find contact on my iPod than it is on my phone.
Apple should be anxious to help ANY cell phone manufacturer incorporate iTunes operability into their products, because all those songs at iTunes would now have a dual-purpose. RING-TONES! and, maybe, some phones would have the ability to play them through a set of ear phones. Isn’t 99 cents the same price all those other other Ring-tone companies are selling their’s for? Apple iTunes would have the largest library of Ring-tones available.
Sony currently uses AAC in their Video Conferencing LIne-up.
AS for Atrac quality, remember, that was the format they developed for their minidisc players, which have been around since about 1992. It was THEIR format, which they developed. It’s an OLDER format than MP3… or about as old. It competed with DAT (Digital Audio Tape) and other like formats. Portable MP3 players have only been around since the late 90s. Sony, like Apple, has historically always liked proprietary formats, remember.
They improved ATRAC over the years, but then they must have realized that something better than MP3 or Atrac was needed, so they worked on AAC. However, I’m sure they were just trying to keep it consistent when they decided on ATRAC players, instead of AAC/MP3.
Make no mistake, Sony still innovates… I don’t see Apple working on the next level DVD-format. Not that Apple isn’t innovative, they are.