“There’s only one thing truly holding mobile phones back from trampling the iPod shuffle. The trouble is, they might never overcome it,” Charles Arthur writes for Netimperative. “The attractions of playing your music on your phone are obvious. You don’t need to buy an iPod shuffle. You don’t have to swap headphones when a call comes in. Transferring the songs is about as easy as putting them on an MP3 player. (Slightly easier, if you’ve been using some of the Windows-based jukeboxes that aren’t Apple’s iTunes.) It fits in your pocket. You already carry it around all the time.”
“So why don’t I think music on phones is quite ready to displace MP3 players like the iPod? Actually to some extent, they will. They are going to encroach on the low end of the market (particularly, the flash memory-based ones like the iPod shuffle and MuVo) as the year progresses. But phones have fatal flaws in a key department: the user interface, specifically data navigation,” Arthur writes. “That’s why, until the user interface side is sorted out, you’re still going to see companies like Apple walking off with the proceeds of iPod sales, and phone companies struggling to sell music downloads with any conviction. It’s not about the content. It’s about how you get to it.”
Full article here.
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