Mobile Music Discovery Is Fine — Storage Is Not

This columnist has voiced his opinion on the devices best suited for listening to music on the go, and come to the conclusion that music phones aren’t good because they don’t have enough storage and syncing via the PC has to be done through a “sadistic” interface. His buying experience at the carriers music store was pretty good though…”Ironically, the music phone systems are very good at finding music quickly and letting you sample the tracks. Discovery is supposed to be the problem for mobile media, but in this case it is the real fun feature. Sprint uses a popularity-driven directory approach that lets you drill into genres and artists and find the most likely choices at the top of the catalogs. Verizon has a nifty predictive search engine that filters results on the fly as you enter more letters so you locate the target in seconds.” Well, he window shopped more than bought.
Some of his complaints about music phones are valid, although I disagree with the one that “you just don’t keep a library of tunes here”. I’ve got a friend with a Walkman and he’s quite happy to load up whatever music he wants to listen to that day in the morning before he goes to work — I think it’s a fairly limited segment of the population who want to carry their entire library of music around with them. Of course, that segment means the dedicated music player will never become extinct.
He concludes that it is just as likely for specialty devices to get voice capabilities and succeed than for phones to get specialty functions. I think this is possible, and will come down to the specific products that hit the market.

Comments have been disabled for this post