Nokia Unveils Digital-Music Player In a Cellphone

Wall Street Journal ^ | 4/28/05 | David Pringle

[BurbankKarl]

Nokia Corp., the world's largest cellphone maker, unveiled its first handset with a built-in hard drive, taking aim at the market for iPods and other stand-alone digital-music players.

Nokia, of Espoo, Finland, said the cellphone, earmarked to go on sale world-wide in the fourth quarter, will be able to store 3,000 songs and have a built-in Wi-Fi radio and camera. Dubbed the Nokia N91, the device will have a retail price of about €700, or about $908, before any subsidies by cellphone-service providers, Nokia officials said. That price compares with about $200 for an iPod mini with a similar storage capacity; the number of songs that can be stored varies because of different compression techniques. IPods are made by Apple Computer Inc.

Nokia's N91, unveiled alongside two high-end camera phones at a news conference in Amsterdam yesterday, underlines how cellphone makers are trying to displace other electronic gizmos as they search for sales growth. Motorola Inc., Schaumburg, Ill., Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea and Sony-Ericsson Mobile Communications Ltd., a joint venture between Sony Corp. of Japan and Sweden's Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson, are among the other cellphone makers aggressively targeting the digital-music-player market.

While the Nokia N91 is more expensive than Apple's iPod, Nokia says the cellphone should be attractive to music buffs because of its ability to download music via third-generation cellphone networks or via the Internet using the short-range wireless standard Wi-Fi. Nokia said the N91 will be able to play music for 12½ hours, compared with about 18 hours for the iPod, on one battery charge.

"Stand-alone music players are not as interesting as they used to be," said Anssi Vanjoki, head of Nokia's multimedia division.

[Flavius]

cool

[proxy_user]

If you want to hear crap sound through garbage electronics, I'm sure this will appeal to you.

[BurbankKarl]

[Sen Jack S. Fogbound]

This is getting rather silly! A hard-drive in a cell phone!
Jeez!

[BurbankKarl]

Not for people who listen to podcasts.....this will get XM Radio too.

[Stormcrow]

Got my PDA? - Check.

Got my digital camera? - Check.

Got my Mp3 player? - Check.

So I'll save the battery in my cell phone for making phone calls.

[Hildy]

I hope this finally bring their stock price up!

[Flavius]

they are going up short term
not to much,

looks like they may have bottomed out now...

so for you hopefully it will keep trading at 15.5-16.5 range until something happens

[SengirV]

What total garbage. How about giveing me a phone that works in a building 1st. Do that and MAYBE I'll think about getting one that takes crappy pictures.

[BurbankKarl]

Cell phones arent designed for buildings...

[Chewbacca]

So, you run around town listening to music on your cell phone, but then decide to make a phone call and find out the battery is dead.

My phone is for calls and that is it.

[SAJ]

Aha! A business opportunity!

Can you hear me now?

:^)

[supercat]

My old Motorola phone let me enter my own tunes for ring tones using the numeric pad. Unfortunately, my new BREW phone only allows getting ringtones through my provider's vendors, and they don't have the ring tones I want (in part because some of them are my own compositions, though others like Franz Behr's "Will O' The Wisp" are public domain but nonetheless seem unavailable).

BTW, I'm surprised phone vendors don't advertise their phones as music playing devices, even if the only "music" they play is somewhat tinny midi ringtones. Advertising their phones as such should allow tunes for such phones to be legally classified as phonorecords, which would in turn mean that any tune which has been sold in recorded form could be licensed for about 8 cents per copy without needing the composer's consent. Since some composers have refused to allow their music to be used as ringtones, such a classification could be a useful workaround.

[tdewey10]

How is it that a 4GB Nokia hard drive can store 3000 songs and a 4GB Apple iPod can only store 1250 songs?

[SengirV]

And last time I checked, a phone wasn't designed to take pictures and listen to music. I guess they have moved there entire R&D department away from getting a better signal and onto squashing a quizenart into a cell phone.

I'm not asking for 4/5 bars here. But one would be nice.

[Eepsy]

I'm assuming it's because songs played on the Nokia will have half the audio quality.

[BurbankKarl]

doesnt apple use their own format? must have some copy protection on each of those songs.