Written by PatrickJ on Thursday, November 2, 2006

Cingular Music Launches – Bad News for iPod and Zune?


Via: Engadget

As expected, Cingular Music was launched today – offering a spread of music-related services for mobiles that look pretty impressive – integration with 3 separate music stores, XM Radio services, and lots of other music / video streaming content.

The offering includes tie-ins to the Napster and Yahoo Music – although apparently not yet including the ability to purchase songs straight to a handset (still having to go via sync with a PC).

I haven’t read through and digested anything like all the information in Cingular’s press releases – but this certainly seems like it will have an impact with mobile users.

It also seems to add weight to some analysts long-standing predictions that cellphones (not Zune or any of the other PMP pretenders) will be the real iPod killers.

What do you think – will this end up being a real threat to iPods and Zune alike?

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Brandon (aka Netsyd)
Nov 2, 2006

I have to agree – to a certain extent – that converged cell phones will be the real iPod killers and not Zune/whatever comes after Zune. I take my phone with me everywhere. I would really rather just have the one device.


Ravi
Nov 3, 2006

what about the life of the battery? do they survive even a whole day without re-charge with all the music?

Ravi.


PatrickJ
Nov 3, 2006

That’s a good point Ravi. I guess for some users music will be the killer app and they may not use wireless, or email sync etc so much and may gain a bit of extra battery life. I’m not sure how strong battery life is on some of the simpler music-oriented devices, but I imagine spare batteries or charging solutions need to be part of the mix if you’re really blasting it all day …


Brandon (aka Netsyd)
Nov 3, 2006

Ravi – are we talking portable players or coverged devices?

Depends on the useage as you would expect. Apple says something rediculous like 16 hours of life right? Yea – here’s how they do that – no backlight running, volume set to just less than 1/2 and a single song on repeat. So the song gets cached into memory and the hard drive never spins. Not realisitic. Really working one of these devices you can’t expect more than 4-5 hours. I can get 4-5 hours out of my 8125 (i think)…

Either way I think Patrick is correct. You’re going to be looking at a multiple battery/recharger with you scenario not matter what. Heck most people have car chargers for their cell phones now… so I don’t see that those folks are losing much anyway?

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