Moco News reports that Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s head of multimedia has predicted that
In the next 6-12 months, there will be more of these announcements. The next to disappear will be the makers of music devices and then the manufacturers of video cameras,”
Nokia made a similarly apprently implausible claim back in 2000 about cameras.
However, James at Moco News points out that the stand alone camera market didn’t in fact die and that the same will be true of MP3 players and video cameras.
I think the truth will be somewhere in between. The phone won’t kill MP3 players, as an example, but there will certainly be a hell of a lot more of us listening to our phones than dedicated players. In fact, there already are, with an estimated 360 million mobile music listeners against 150 million MP3 players ever sold.
I’d actually go so far as to say that 2006 will be the peak year for MP3 players, if 2005 wasn’t already.
For me, when I trade in my phone, the fact that I can buy the Sony Ericsson W950 with 4 GB internal memory, the same as a Nano will almost certainly mean that my iPod goes the way of my PDA some years ago. One day you forget to recharge it and then you never bother again.
As I’ve written before, that’s one reason why Apple just has to be considering an iPhone. Otherwise, an important part of their market is just about to implode. And no iPods mean no iTunes, which is going to shake things up somewhat.
Russell have to say that the W950 was the standout device from this years 3GSM.
Talking with the Sony guys here in London they are saying that the aggressive strategy that Sony has adopted in Japan against iTunes has started to pay dividends. The company has learnt from its failure of Betamax that it’s the content that wins the battle. An thus it is holding back tracks for exclussive distribution on the Connect platform. The new DisktoPhone software will see the W950 become an MP3 players that happens to make/take calls. The interesting thing is that SE decided that they do not need to add a camera to the device.
Looking around the Mobile Networks executives over the past three months and most are using the SE W800 has their personal phone and so I think it is true that amoung the “adults” a music phone is more likely to be used rather than two seperate devices. If this is true then we can say that the iPod could follow the same path as PDAs and be restricted to a small niche.
Anyway I guess that Anssi needs to go and engage ideo so that Nokia finally has a handset that people will start buying again. The teenagers that I know were asking me to buy either a Pink Motorola or a Samsung handset as a Christmas present and whilst they said that they found using a Nokia easy it just did not float their boat.
If you’d paid attention to Apple, you’d realise the iPod was the trojan into the iTunes Music Store (not the other way around). They always expected the iPod to become less popular eventually, but they needed a way to draw people into the store initially.
I saw the same report and virtually right next to it was a research company claiming that Apple will be shipping $4.2Bn wireless Ipods by 2010. How they get to this figure is a mystery but interesting idea.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21032006/101/apple-ship-4-2b-worth-wireless-ipods-2010.html
Alex - I understood that Apple’s reason to be in this market is to sell iPods. iTunes alone is barely profitable, if not loss making. So take away iPod sales and there’s no business model.
Are you suggesting, by your paying attention jibe, that this is wrong? Any evidence to support it? I’m happy to be corrected.
But if you’re half right and they just used the iPod to get iTunes in play, the only conclusion is that they will have to raise prices to make it profitable, which I reckon would see people abandoning it in droves.
Russel
Although I’m still a dedicated device kind of guy, I do have handsets that can play music (which I rarely use), and I don’t have a standalone MP3 player (but my son has a shuffle).
Enough storage on the handset is part of the equation, but I’m wondering about battery life. With voice, data and multimedia, how do these new music playing handsets stack up in terms of battery usage?
The reason I ask is because I’ve been trying a multimedia phone from Samsung and so far after light to medium voice usage (60 minutes), and some web browsing and multimedia, the battery runs out at the end of the day. Is this handset an anomaly?
[...] There is some interesting discussion in Mobhappy about Mobiles Killing-off Music Players and Cameras. Nokia’s head of multimedia makes an aggressive stand stating this fact. However, Russell responds with: Nokia made a similarly apprently implausible claim back in 2000 about cameras. However, James at Moco News points out that the stand alone camera market didn’t in fact die and that the same will be true of MP3 players and video cameras. [...]
Music Phones are to iPods as Blackberries are to Laptops…
I was reading this article on MobHappy about how “Mobiles Will Kill iPods and Video Cameras” earlier today. I agree with some (but not all) of the issues raised in this article. As the owner of a Sony Ericsson W800……
I totally agree. Here’a another reason to consider: it’s not fair to compare integrating cell phones with cameras and with mp3 players. Phones haven’t had too big of an impact on the digital camera market for technical reasons. I haven’t seen a camera phone that would produce images that match photos taken with my Canon Powershot and therefore would never use a camera phone to take pictures that I want to save for generations (I do use it quite a lot to take pics of fun things that I share with my friends). Integrating MP3s with cell phones seems much easier, and therefore it’s possible to have a phone which plays mp3s as well as any other mp3 player; phones seem to pose a bigger threat to mp3 players than to digital cameras, at least for now.