iTunes Phone As iLame As iExpected

from the underwhelmed dept

Wed, Sep 7th 2005 11:22am — Carlo Longino

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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Victor, 7 Sep 2005 @ 2:52pm

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Sad to see this phone. e398 is actually a good phone in itself (RAZR V3 is the same), but re-badging a t-mobile phone as an iTunes is a sorry thing to do.
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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j, 17 Sep 2005 @ 2:47am

I wonder if you used the phone
I actually liked it!
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crystalattice, 6 Oct 2005 @ 1:29pm

I've always wondered about this.
What's the point of having a multipurpose phone? If you use the music player you have less battery power for your phone. Having an arbitrary song limit is stupid; at least the Sony Clie PDA let you use Memory Sticks to store as many songs as you want. It's even dumber when you consider people upgrade their phones more often than a music player; why spend hundreds of dollars on something that's more limited than a standard iPod (song-wise) and that you'll want to upgrade in 18 months?
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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