“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