Motorola faces the music
p2p news / p2pnet: Motorola is making another bid to get into the muscle-bound but ineffective corporate music business.
Its iTunes Rokr, limited to 100 sings, fell flat on its face so now meet the 7 to $10 a month Rokr E2 iRadio , due out early this year sans iTunes and boasting about 70 hours of music that goes from the Net to the phone via users’ computers.
But it’s still not going to work, says The Street.
“It’s an ugly detour, and an acknowledgement of how challenging of a business model it is to offer music,” it has analyst Roger Entner, saying, referring to the iRadio idea
“There are phones that already have an FM tuner in them – why do I have to pay $7 a month for radio?”
Motorola’s iRadio service will compete with downloan rental services such as Rhapsody, which now has the might of Microsoft behind it, and Napster, with little to offer but itself, which isn’t much.
It also be up against satellite broadcasts from such as Sirius and, “In fact, Sirius and Sprint have an agreement to offer 20 channels of music for a monthly charge,” says The Street.
Subscribers should be able to access iRadio sometime during the first half of this year, Macworld Daily News has a Motorola spokesman saying, “although when is up to the carriers”.
iRadio will initially be available to US carriers only, but the company plans to, “demonstrate the service in France later this month and then launch the service internationally later this year.” says the story.
Also See:
flat on its face – Did Apple scotch the ROKR?, November 9, 2005â¬
The Street – Motorola Faces Music, January 3, 2005
Macworld Daily News – iRadio kills the iTunes star?. January 4, 2005
January 4th, 2006 at 8:36 pm
It is to bad the satellite phones did not take off like the cell phone has. We would already have a full media and phone with no dead spots. the phone could be a tv tuner as well. What were we thinking suporting the cell system. it is limited and should be left behind.
January 5th, 2006 at 8:22 am
Satellite phones need to be able to push a signal to a satellite not just a few miles or kilometres to a tower. This means the following issues exist in satellite phones compared to cell phones.
Power. Pushing a signal all that way needs buckets of it, relatively speaking. Much more than a normal cell phone at least. I forget whether the signal strength needed to cover distance is the distance squared or cubed, but either way, covering a few miles instead of 22,500 miles for a geostationary satellite or even 300 – 900 miles for low earth orbit satellites takes a lot less signal strength and thus power consumption while talking.
Since the signal has to be much stronger, and the batteries obviously bigger, there’s no way you’d get a pocket sized satellite phone. Well, not unless you’ve got damned big pockets anyway. Also if there are any health risks associated with cell phone radiation, then there would be much larger risks associated with satellite phone radiation due to the much greater amount of radiation being emitted.
Cost also is an issue as well as greater latencies involved in talking over such long distances, but mainly it’s the power issue. Companies are working on various solutions involving low earth satellites, but they still require more power than normal cell networks so i dunno how long it’ll be before they really take off.
Check out this link where i got my numbers from.
http://www.govtech.net/magazine/story.php?id=95172&issue=11:1998