For reasons that are my own, I don't really dig in to the iPod vs >insert music player here< battles because there really is no right or wrong side of the coin. You love your iPod, or you love your iRiver or whatever else and that is all that matters. I do however read all of the hype about convergence between cell phone and music player and how the iPod will lose dominance to the music enabled phone. One word. Thirteen letters. FORGETABOUTIT!
I have a music enabled Treo. Not a single song loaded on it. I have a music enable LG something or other. Not a song loaded on it. I just got a music enabled Razr for my personal phone. I won't load a song on it. My wife and daughter just got music enabled Samsung phones. Neither of them will load a song. Why not? After all there were 10 times more music phones sold last quarter than iPods and I have a total of 7 of them if you toss in my son's phone. No. No. No.
I stopped at Verizon this past Sunday to get the new phone. It was time. As I stood there waiting for help I listened to Chevelle Point #1 on my iPod. One of the Verizon greeters came up to me and of course tried to instantly sell me on their LG Chocolate phone as he saw the iPhones hanging out of my iEars. I'll save you the details of what he said to try to convince me to buy it (he never lied once) but I shot him down with some very real and simple points.
- All of my 400+ CD RIPs are in 128 kbps AAC. iTunes defaulted to this years ago and I have never felt the need to change it. None will play on the Chocolate.
- I have purchased well over 200 songs from the iTunes Music Store. None will play on the Chocolate.
- I have downloaded well over 100 free songs from the iTunes Music Store. Again, none will play on the Chocolate.
- The LG has less memory than my 1 GB 1G iPod Nano. $200 for a music player and then another $100 or so for a 2 GB Micro SD card. That is double the price that I paid for the 4 GB 2G iPod Nano that I bought for my wife a few weeks ago.
- The LG has FAR less memory than my 30 GB 5G iPod. No card available to match that one.
- I LOVE iTunes. I do. Manages my music perfectly. Allows my family to share libraries with zero config and purchases from the iTMS allow us to load protected AAC files on all of our iPods. It's not perfect, but it works very well for me.
- Verizon charges $1.99 per song plus $15.99 to enable the Vcast service which you have to have for music to work on the phone. iTunes songs are .99 each and there is no monthly subscription price to pay to get my iPod to spin the tunes.
The greeter was well schooled because he said, "you know, you could re-rip all of your CD's and burn your iTMS songs to CD and re-import". After a painful 10 seconds of very awkward silence he smiled and said that he would get someone to change me to the Razr.
I have a difficult time keeping enough of a battery charge to get me through the day using my phone as a phone. None of these MP3 phones has the ease of use or the click wheel that my iPod has and only two phones from Cingular have iTunes on them. As much as I would love to have a single device that I could put in my pocket to handle my phone, email and music I will continue to carry my iPod, my Razr and my Treo.
Convergence doesn't work for me. Until Apple pops an iPhone.
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