Mobile Music Sharing

By: Kevin Cantera

Sales of portable music players are booming, and phone manufacturers would like to join the frenzy. A large and growing number of people already take their phones along wherever they go and now the era of the music phone is dawning, with phones available today that are able to store and play songs. Known as music-capable phones, they're still primarily devices to carry conversation, but they can store songs in their memories.

Known as music-optimized cell phones, these gadgets are serious music players. Some have miniature hard drives that can hold all kinds of songs as many as the iPod mini. Others have removable storage cards. It just makes sense, after all. No one wants to carry around two devices if they don't have to.

Hard drives, which make possible the storage of thousands of songs, are expensive, as are removable storage cards. But the price of hardware tends to fall quickly. Over time, music-optimized phones could become as common and affordable as today's camera phones.

Optimized music phones have created a whole new category. They're very good music players that also happen to make phone calls. It's the device formerly known as the cell phone. Some people might drop an audio player for a converged device, but most of the opportunity is for new customers, people who have never owned an MP3 player.

The first cell phone, introduced in 1983, was a massive device that weighed 2 pounds and cost nearly four grand! Almost a quarter-century later, most cell phones are smaller than a deck of cards and many are given away for free to encourage consumers to sign up for service plans. And the newest phones do far more than allow people to talk.

Today, about 3 billion people have cell phones worldwide, compared to about 300 million who have computers. The goal for programmers now is to develop applications that are as handy on cell phones as those that have been developed for computers.

At the outset, one factor that slowed the evolution of cell phones was the limited deployment of wireless broadband networks. But carriers now offer high-speed data plans that allow cell phones to access vast quantities of information from the Internet faster than the snail's pace common only a couple of years ago. And traditional Internet service providers are beginning to deploy broadband wireless networks that can accommodate cell phones and easily download music to them.

So the writing is on the wall for the old way of getting music and listening to it. Mobile devices continue to proliferate and become more and more adaptable to the changes in the Internet.

So look for your favorite music – coming soon to a phone near you.

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