Will music-player mobile phones kill off the iPod?

Not so long ago, to be really mobile, one would have to buy a mobile phone, a digital camera, an mp3 player and a pda (personal digital assistant), all separately of course. Some brands started integrating these four functions like Nokia (with their old big pda & mobile phones) and more recently most mobile producers have integrated digital cameras in their handsets, although of pitiful quality in the beginning. Now some phones offer cameras with 1.5 or even 2 megapixels (which allows to take quite reasonable quality pics, even though good digital cameras do 5 or 7 Mpixels).

In the meantime the digital music market exploded with all the mp3 players of which the iPod got to be the most famous and dominating the market. More recently some mobile phone companies started exploring that promising market as well. After timid attempts at music-player phones by Motorola (with the 100-tune holding ROKR, with iTunes) and Sony-Ericsson (with its Walkman with flash memory cards of 512 MB extendable to 1 GB) two more have come into this market – Nokia and Samsung, which are introducing hard-disk phones. These go one step further as the previous generations. The Samsung SGH-i310 and the Nokia N91 now offer capacity for 2,000 and 3,000 tunes respectively (4MB/song). Plus a 2 Megapixel camera on top of that. But Sony-Ericsson seems to be changing its strategy, having improved the walkman offer with its most recent handsets like the W950i Walkman (with a Flash memory card of 4GB) or the Walkman W810, with tactile screens to facilitate handling. But these don’t offer a camera anymore. The P990i remains an alternative for a mix of pda and mobile handset, with tactile screen.

The news is that Nokia, after dragging its feet for several years, is finally making a jump to the forefront of mobile technology again. Part of the N series of multimedia handsets, the Nokia N91 smartphone is destined to give Sony Ericsson's walkman series a hard time. Integrating a 4 GB hard drive, the Nokia N91 is a surprisingly small smartphone given its features. And it should support most music formats such as MP3, AAC, WMA and M4A, using an USB 2.0 cable to drag and drop files when connected to a compatible computer. But watch out for Samsung too.

So, with such an offer, what would you do with both a phone and a Nano crowding your pockets ? Even though 1,000 or 3,000 tunes is still nowhere near the top iPod’s 15,000 (60GB), Apple is not taking the threat lightly. And, let’s agree, it would take over 60 hours to listen to 1,000 tunes alone, so for most journeys, the capacity now proposed is perfect. So what will Apple come up with? Even though there isn’t much information, Apple has apparently copyrighted the expression ‘my mobile’ and is certainly looking to design their own handsets.
So maybe we will not have high quality compact integrated handsets that soon (with pda, camera and mp3 player) but, after Apple has revolutionised the mp3 player market, watch out for the mobile phone market!

Competition is fierce out there, but for the meantime my Sony-Ericsson walkman should do. It’s hard to keep up with the offer and technological update…

(the first picture does not display a real offer from Apple, it's only a graphic taken from Mixmag, created by Munnoo)