More thoughts on the phone as MP3 player...

A reader had an interesting comment on my earlier post on why I don't think that cell phones with MP3 players will replace the iPod. He pointed out that Apple has been working with Motorola to develop an iTunes-compatible phone, and that an Apple-designed interface would combine the advantages of the iPod's easy to use interface with a cell phone.

It's an interesting thought, but I don't really agree. Why

here are my MP3 players - a 10 gig firewire iPod and a 1 gig shuffle.

here is my phone - a Motorola i95cl

So what do these pictures show, beyond the fact that I suck at taking close-ups of stationary objects, and that I'm so messy that I use empty cardboard boxes for furniture?

Well, the iPod Shuffle has 3 buttons/switches on it, counting the jog wheel as one button. The iPod has 7, if you count each of the four buttons as seperate (since they are actual physical buttons on this model) and the touch wheel as a button. The cell phone, on the other hand, has 23 (counting the volume up/down and the jog wheel as one button each).

See, cell phones have to have lots of numbers on them, because that's how people are used to dialing phones. MP3 players don't. All you really do is go forward/back, play/pause, and change the volume and mode. Adding an MP3 player to a phone either means adding extra menus to the current setup and using the current buttons to navigate, or adding even more buttons for the MP3 player. That is going to be a challange that I think any interface designer will have trouble overcoming.

The other I think makes it harder is the convergence between something and cell phones that is already happening- but not MP3 players or cameras. I'm talking email. It's one of the functions that Gates touted in his speech. It's also a big part of many people's buisness world, as Treos and RIM BlackBerries and other handheld messanging devices with phones built in become popular. Email and the cell go together, and are useful. But being able to send emails means being able to type, and that means having 26 keys for the alphabet, plus punctuation.

We have a BlackBerry where I work, and it's bulky, and the interface isn't real great. It's hard to imagine using it as an MP3 player. And while the bulk will go down and the interface will improve, nobody can get past the fact that MP3 players don't need a lot of buttons, while cell phones and wireless messanging devices do - and that creates a device that is going to be both physically imposing and with a very complex interface - the two things most people don't want in an MP3 player.