“Rumors about a Motorola phone which could play iTunes have been floating around for a long time. We’ve already showed you some of the first pictures of the device, and we knew that it would be based on the popular E398 model, but will be in white housing and will be sold as Motorola E790. It will still feature the same display, design, camera and as the E398, but will have a new music key on its front. Motorola didn’t announced it officially, but since the device got FCC approval we at least know for sure that is exists and its User Manual confirms that it is an iTunes phone! Another new thing about the E790 is that it will be a quad-band GSM phone (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), featuring both European 900/1800 MHz and US 850/1900 MHz bands and it will work on every GSM network. The manual also mentions EDGE indicator, allowing us to speculate that the E790 (unlike the E398) might even be EDGE capable,” phoneArena.com reports.
More info and photos of the phone, iTunes interface and iTunes manual here.
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Does quad band GSM mean it will work on any network?
you have to be joking…
If the Maunal is correct, it is too complicated to be successful.
No autosyncing. You have to drag and drop the songs into the memory card in the phone?
This is terrific!
People will buy this in droves before anyone reads the manual.
No quad band doesn’t mand ‘any’ network. It does mean that the chance of you getting a provider is greater than with out it. Plus you get the benifit of being able to travel around the world, and just replace the sim card in other countries for local and long distance calls.
“it will work on every GSM network.” means it will work on any network.
coughcoughvaporphonecough
Just check the newspapers for news of a mass death, because whatever room this phone is due to be released at will just be a room full of dead people who breathed in the poison vapors surrounding this product.
MDN Magic Word: “million” as in there is a 1 in a million chance this phone will ever be released.
It won’t work for all the carriers in the US. Most still use other standards than GSM. They all used to say how inferior GSM was to their standard. Each Carrrier had their own system. This way you could not take one phone and switch to another system.
TDMA
CDMA
PCS
are still being used.
GSM carriers in the US are T-Mobile and Cingular (they have almost switched over). ATT wireless was bought by Cingular.
I would not be surprised if you have to physically connect the phone to the computer or go over Cingular’s network to acccess your computer. They prevent BT on their phones to connect directly to your computer. Only if you buy a phone directly from Siemens, Nokia, or motorola without Cingular’s discount, can you get a fully functional phone.
So that means Verizon won’t carry it unless 1) they make a CDMA version and 2) BT is blocked from connecting with computers.
Doesn’t look “worthy of its own event” to me.
It just doesn’t seem very iTunes worthy to me. This seems more like speculation. I’ll wait until a ‘real’ announcement before I worry about it. I’d like one, and I hope that if Sprint really isn’t going to carry it that it proves to be worth me switching away at contract expiration time.
Tommy Boy — I’ll take those 1 in a million odds. How about 100 dollars that the phone is released by the September 30, 2005?
AL, I think you got it mixed up. Cingular does not cripple their BT phones. Neither does T-mobile. I used a T68i w/ T-mobile and its BT was fully functional. Same as my current T637 from AT&T/Cingular. The only carriers (AFAIK) that cripples BT functionality in the US are Verizon and Sprint.
Typical Apple simplicity. It’s so plainly straightforward, one might wonder how they’ll ever manage create a significant announcement event around it.
But you know they will. heh. Bet that new phone will just work like a champion.
Thanks AL
We use Verizon at the moment. Your comments about BT functionality are interesting. The missus wants to get a Treo so that a. She has a phone, b. it has a PDA functionality and c. it sync to her PB which has BT built in.
c. is kinda important. Do you think the Treo that Verizon sells are crippled for BT use.
I do not like the way US carriers operate. They try and lock you in however they can. If Verizon start playing around with me like that, they I’m off to another carrier. Our contract ends in April so unless the Treo works fully ir sayonara Verizon.
i wish E790 is not the long-waiting iTunes Phone >.<
PT,
If you buy a GSM phone from Cingular, it is locked to Cingular. It cannot be used on another carrier by simply swapping SIM cards. The ROKR is a prime example. I travel a lot and it is cheaper for me to get a prepaid SIM card for the country I am in than use a US based account. I can do that with any phone I purchase directly from the manufacturer. i.e. PAY FULL AMOUNT. Not a discounted amount with a 2 year contract. I have several Motorolas and Siemens phones which work great.
I tried other phones from a variety of vendors. They all want to make as much money as possible. They rather have you use their network than allow you to use your computers. Some are blatant, and some are subtle. You can connect via BT with some phones, but you cannot surf the web via your home computer on a phone bought from a carrier while you can surf the web via BT from an identical phone bought from the manufacturer.
The phone manufacuter do not care what you do with the phone, the carriers tell the manufacturer what features they will allow.
PT,
You may be right about T-mobile. They are owned by Deutche Telekom. In Europe they do not play these games. You get all the features and the phones are not locked. I have one phone from T-mobile (germany) which is not crippled. The US subsidiary may or may not play games.
PT…Cingular occasionally disables some of the Bluetooth profiles on phones that are locked to Cingular. Usually, they disable DUN (dial up networking), so that you have to use their GPRS or EDGE. Cingular does lock their phones so that they cannot be used with other SIMs. They do this because Cingular seems to have taken the lead over T-Mobile in offering cool phones (RAZR is a perfect example), and they don’t want you to buy phones from them and moving over to another provider.
In case it’s not clear, a GSM phone can ONLY work on a GSM system. What they mean by quad-band is that it has 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 frequencies. In the US, 850 and 1900 is predominant, especially 1900. In rural areas, 850 (only through Cingular, but you can roam with T-Mobile) is used because it has a wider range. In Europe, 900 is predominant, but 1800 is almost as widespread as 900.
GSM is the most used mobile phone system used in the world. Only Japan, Korea, and the USA uses non-GSM phones.
The greatest thing about a quad-band GSM phone is that you can make and receive calls anywhere in the GSM system. It’s a bit expensive to chat with your buddy about his latest girlfriend, but if you’re on business it’s cheaper than using the hotel phone. I’ve been using T-Mobile’s (or Voicestream) internationally for nearly 8 years. Can’t live with out it.
One last thing. This phone ain’t no iPod.
That’s ugly. I like the RAZR much better
My guess is that, long term, it isn’t going to necessarily be about the phone being ‘Apple-like’ but will rather be about many distinctly Motorola-styled phones, many of them perhaps substantially different from each other but all with at least one in-demand feature in common, namely an iTunes button.
Motorola will do what it does well; it will make Motorola phones .. and I suspect many of those phones will ultimately accomodate the elegant iTunes music management program as a big plus. I further suspect that they will sell very handsomely indeed.
AL said: “If the Maunal is correct, it is too complicated to be successful.
No autosyncing. You have to drag and drop the songs into the memory card in the phone?”
That’s how iTunes works with the iPod… It never said Autosyncing doesn’t work… Think before you speak (write), Dumbass.
I’m with Tom, this phone is butt ugly!
*Wants an IDEN network iPhone for Nextel*