Cingular takes another direction for music on mobile
Filed under: News, General, Napster, eMusic
Cingular is set to launch a non-OTA music service for its mobile phones. Details are a bit sketch but, the new Cingular service will be vastly different than that of its mobile phone market competitors. Users will be able to download from three competing web services, Napster, Yahoo! Music and eMusic and transfer those tracks to their Cingular handset of choice via cable connection to a PC (Uh, wasn’t 3G supposed to make all these wires go away? Bluetooth? Wi-Fi?)
Cingular’s system breaks the mold set by other mobile operator backed services which have attempted to dive deep into your wallet while failing to mention that most handsets will happily play the Mp3’s you already own. It may be a bit old school but, Cingular’s service sounds like a good deal for end users, as opposed to a magic tool for removing dollars from customer’s wallets.
I’ve been pretty anti-mp3 phone in the past, and that hasn’t april music I’m still unconvinced that you’ll get anything more than a substandard version of phone, mp3 player or both when you attempt to mix the two together in one device. For certain, it’s not as easy a recipe as peanut butter and chocolate. If you remove the crazy types of restrictions that most mobile providers use to hijack your wallet, a slightly sub par mp3 player/phone wouldn’t be a bad alternative to say, owning a “nice” PMP and a smaller ultra portable class player.