.Dust

Michael Garten­berg, a Jupiter­Re­search VP & Research Direc­tor, has recently pub­lished a very inter­est­ing post titled “How to make a music phone good enough to use”.

This is an inter­est­ing sub­ject to explore.

The main points raised in the post are:

1. Real head­phone jack.
2. Work­able UI.
3. Seam­less sync with WMP or iTunes.
4. At least 8 Gb of flash.
5. 8 hours play­back + 6 hours of talk time.

I would like to add some per­sonal con­sid­er­a­tions on these five items and add a few ones.

• Real head­phone jack.

I com­pletely agree on this. If you are going to use your phone as a music phone you may want to use high qual­ity head­phone from some of the major ven­dors (e.g. Shure, Sennheiser). Any­way I think that you will need to con­sider that if you will use such head­phone you will not be able to use your phone hands free since these kind of head­phones do not have a micro­phone. This will have an impact on user expe­ri­ence. You will have two options: you can carry with you another piece of hard­ware for your hands free oper­a­tion or you will have to use the phone micro­phone in some uncom­fort­able way. The other thing that need to be con­sid­ered is that adding a stan­dard head­phone jack to an hand­set will have an impact on the phone size, weight, pro­tec­tion from exter­nal agents (e.g. dust, water splashes, etc) and, at the end of the day, on cost.

• Work­able UI.

This is one of the major issues that a phone ven­dor should take in account. Most of the default music player on cur­rent phones have a messy user inter­face which leads to a very bad user expe­ri­ence. Even if your appli­ca­tion come from a third party ven­dor it’s not sure you will have the best user expe­ri­ence in the world. In this area the ref­er­ence point is the iPod user inter­face. My per­sonal opin­ion is that any­thing dif­fer­ent would be a com­pli­ca­tion for the end user. I think that in this par­tic­u­lar area we are suf­fer­ing some effects from mar­ket dynam­ics. The oper­a­tor wants new hand­sets on the mar­ket at a very fast pace. This means that phone ven­dors have to con­cen­trate on mak­ing the phone work from a radio stand­point. This leave very lit­tle space for (good) user appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment. Most of the time you will get a stan­dard imple­men­ta­tion from the provider of the phone Oper­at­ing System.

• Seam­less sync to WMP or iTunes.

This is really imper­a­tive. As a music enthu­si­ast I may have my music com­ing from my own CDs, online music store and oper­a­tor music store. I want all of this music avail­able on all of my devices (phone and per­sonal computer).

• At least 8 Gb of flash.

I do not com­pletely agree on this. Flash mem­ory is get­ting cheaper and cheaper but will defin­i­tively have an impact on the phone cost. Since I’m using a music phone I would pre­fer to have my music sit­ting some­where in the oper­a­tor on-​line stor­age and I want to stream my music any­time, any­where. Prob­a­bly the ital­ian mar­ket in which I live is a lit­tle bit bet­ter in terms of uni­form cov­er­age com­pare to the more frag­mented US mar­ket but I think this is the best option for a music phone. Obvi­ously you will need to have a good data rate for stream­ing and a ded­i­cated data plan to make this a good scenario.

• 8 hours play­back + 6 hours talk time.

Well, I think that in the near future this will be hard. My own iPod nano does not make three hours of play­back (yes, I’ve charged it lot of times). This is the best use sce­nario I could request from a phone ven­dor but today I can­not imag­ine any ven­dor that will be able to com­ply to this request, at least if you don’t want to carry the phone bat­tery in your backpack.

Apart from these com­ments on Michael post I would like to add some­thing that I would really have from a music phone.

• Over The Air pur­chase of songs. I really like this even if there are some caveats. I am will­ing to pur­chase songs from the oper­a­tor if
  

  I have a huge cat­a­log of artists and songs.
  They sup­port a super-​distribution DRM model allow­ing me to play my pur­chased songs on my phone and on my per­sonal computer.

• Store my songs on the oper­a­tor net­work or my home per­sonal com­puter and stream them on demand. (e.g. Orb)
• If I hold my songs on the hand­set and my hand­set fails I want to be able to restore all of my pur­chased songs for free. Many DRM mod­els used today by oper­a­tors will gen­er­ate licenses tied to a sin­gle phone. If that phone crashes all your songs are gone for good.
• I want the music store embed­ded in the media player. I do no want to jump back and forth from the oper­a­tor web/​wap por­tal to the phone media player.
• I would like to man­age my playlist from my per­sonal com­puter and not from the phone. This fea­ture, together with net­work stor­age, will be very easy to imple­ment. If you have ever tried to cre­ate a playlist on a phone you know what I mean.
• I want to share my playlist with my friends.
• I want to lis­ten to podcasts.

The orig­i­nal post from Michael Garten­berg can be found here.

Why do I blog this ?

I think that the music phone arena is grow­ing rapidly and rep­re­sent a per­fect arena for inno­va­tion. Actu­ally this is the first real post of .dust and I thought that the sub­ject was per­fect for a good start.

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