iPhones?

Originally posted 2005-05-12 15:21:00

Bill Gates claims that the iPod will tumble towards irrelevance, displaced by mobile phones with integrated MP3 players. Can you sense the iPod envy? Frustrated at his inability to make any inroads into the portable music market, Gates tries to sell the convergence chimera. When have convergent devices pushed anything aside? TVs with integrated DVD players? PDAs with mobile phone capabilities? Peanut butter and chocolate? (Well, I guess that one works)

Convergent products teeter into a niche, snapped up by the Mensa crowd, while successful products diverge. For every Treo user you see, you see dozens of of people chatting on PDA-less Nokias, Motorolas, and Ericssons. Can you hear me now? And these phone-only chatters have no clue how to set up their calendar in their phones. They just talk, play games, and download ringtones. Consumers want products that stretch and grow, becoming more refined. They don’t want products that huddle together, compromising ability for compatibility.

\”Aha!\” you shout. \”What about mobile phones with cameras!\” Yes, finding cameraless phones has become more difficult than finding those with shutters, but these succeed only because the camera doen’t interfere with the phone. It adds virtually no size or weight. More telling, no one tosses their real camera for their mobile phone camera. They buy both, and use the mobile phone camera for trivial, spontaneous shots. They use the real camera to fill their scrapbooks. The two products haven’t truly converged. The phone has just stretched a little. Regular cameras continue to sell at a brisk clip, and continue to own the photography domain.

Why couldn’t MP3 players do the same? Of course they could. They could add MP3 capabilities, and people would use them. Perhaps all phones soon will come with MP3 capabilities, and people will listen to music from their cell phones. That’s only half of Gates’ argument, though–the other half claims iPods will go away. Hogwash. For MP3 phones to displace iPods, they’d have to play music just as well as iPods. They’d have to hold as many songs. They’d have to provide navigation controls that are just as simple to use. They couldn’t compromise.

To wrap the iPod’s capabilities into a cell phone, however, would bulk up the cell phone to the size of the iPod, plus a little more size to accommodate the phone’s bits. It would complicate the interface–do you meld the MP3 player’s controls with the phone’s, so that you are never quite sure if a button is going to call Uncle Fred or play \”Don’t Phunk With My Heart\”? Or do you lay out the controls side by side, and carry a manual about which button does what? I know my all-in-one remote at home has 3,748 buttons, and I’ve carefully memorized the positions of the three I use. If I had to call Grandma from the thing, I’d revert to letter writing.

So, yes: future cell phones will be able to play a few songs, and some intrepid brick-sized devices will store your entire CD collection and let you provide your own \”on hold\” muzak. Most of us, though, will tote our cell phones in one pocket, our iPods in the other, and snicker at the gadget nerds dialling 867-5309 while listening to Tommy Tutone.