iTunes Phone As iLame As iExpected
from the underwhelmed dept
Apple, Cingular and Motorola execs gathered in San Francisco to day to slap each other on the backs and use all the buzzwords they've been saving up in the 13 months it's taken them to actually release the iTunes phone. The phone follows all the latest rumors, though it doesn't have a 25-song limit, but it's unclear if the capacity is limited by the size of the Transflash memory cards it uses, or an arbitrary cap put in to appease somebody in the value chain (Update: It's apparently an arbitrary cap). The companies are pitching the phone as a Shuffle combined with a Motorola phone, which makes it a big, expensive Shuffle packed in an unattractive body surrounded by a user interface that's notoriously bad. To make things even worse for Motorola, Steve Jobs showed off the latest version of the iPod, the Nano, that's sure to steal all the headlines from the iTunes phone -- and rightfully so. The expectation was that this would be an "iPod phone", and along with those expectations came the hype. But it's turned out to be a reworked model of an old Motorola phone that happens to run a tiny version of iTunes. Motorola may have licensed the iTunes brand, but Apple's cool didn't come with it.
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The firmware can be transfered over to an older e398 and I have a big suspicion that any e398 can be an iTunes phone
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I wonder if you used the phone
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I've always wondered about this.
Personally, I just want a phone to make calls. Music players are getting small enough that the size shouldn't be a factor anymore. PDA's that have music players make a little more sense but again, the player sucks up the battery life.
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