Boing Boing and Make are foaming over this thing called Ditty Bot, which is going to let you stream music from your Mac to your cell phone. I wonder if they really considered how ludicrous this whole thing is. Come on - you stream music from your computer using SkypeOut ($$$s) and listening to it over a cellphone connections (more $$$s) and get questionable quality. A data-on-cellphone plan is going to cost $25 a month. At 2 cents a minute, an hour of SkypeOut is going to cost $1.20. Do this an hour a day for 30 days and you have spend about $60. Of course, you could buy a iShuffle for $99, but that would be too simple! And who would want to listen to higher quality of music!
6 comments so far
12:05 PM PT
That’s not even counting the amazing battery drain effect of having your phone’s data connection always blazing. You’re better off getting an iPod, or at least a phone with a bunch of memory.
12:21 PM PT
“The fascinating thing is not how well the bear dances, but merely that he dances at all.”
6:13 PM PT
Streaming this makes little (economic) sense; but a quick transmission (of an ultra-compressed version?) save into phone memory/hard drive might be more interesting.
Of course this could get more interesting if one could send a tune to someone else’s phone (or send a “Hey, check this out” and a link to request it from your computer).
It still would not be economical, but in an age of vast available data (audio files and otherwise) trusted recommendations are not to be underestimated!
The ultimate answer to search is: recommendation.
/EP
12:49 PM PT
This struck me too - the high cost of making the phone call. I wonder why he didn’t try using the Vonage soft-phone. That would be nice!
1:15 PM PT
I think this is a pretty lame idea to be honst. in the long run when itunes on phones becomes available, one won’t need to do all these stupid hacks! vonage softphone is an option, but everything still costs money!
12:33 PM PT
Economically, yeah, it’s stupid. This is a hack, folks, it’s intended to show off cool stuff that you can do with Automator. I seriously doubt that the author actually intended it to be useful in a “replace your iPod” sense. It seems to me that this is more of a stupid Mac trick, a way to say “Hey, look what I can do!”
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