Apple Design Features in Phone??

[glockster]

They're discussing the new Motorola Phone + iTunes elsewhere, but I'm primarily interested in what Mac users think about it in terms of "Apple Design."

My own impression is that Apple had nothing to do with it other than provide the technology required to make it play iTunes.

I see nothing distinctive about it. OTOH I'm not certain how you can made a cell phone have any design that's especially interesting. Looks like any one of a number of cell phones to me.

Cingular has a variety of "deals" on cell phones, including the very best. But in this case we're not looking at the design or the cellphone only (am off on a small side issue), but also the purchase of 2 years of Cingular service. That "design feature," if you will, is chilling to many people.

Back on topic: The think looks plain vanilla cell phone to me. Anyone see any design features, i.e., design being form follows function? And the function in this case is pretty limited. 100 songs? It can't be based on number alone. What about digital books? What about podcasts? Why don't they bother to state the number of GB of space?

Apple "design?" Where?

[jhollington]

Well, keep in mind that it's a Motorola phone, so it would follow their design philosophy, rather than Apple's. The only thing that's even remotely Apple-ish about it is the iTunes integration and the somewhat iPod-like interface for the music portion.

As for the Cingular deal, that tends to be how the cell phone industry works... the whole carrier-subsidy thing comes into play, which has always been rather amusing. Given time, I'm sure other carriers will start to offer this phone,but in the meantime Cingular is the only game in town.

It's reasons like this that I don't see Apple ever producing a cell phone.... It's a much more complicated industry than most people realize.

As for storage, I'm guessing that it's 512Mb TOTAL (including storage of the phone firmware as well). This would seem to make sense based on the usual Apple/iTunes estimation that a "song" is 128kbps and 4 minutes in length.

In fact, here's what Motorola's web site says:

Total storage capacity is limited by number of songs. Storage capacity is approximate and based on 4 minutes per song and 128Kbps AAC encoding. Actual storage capacity is dependent on mobile phone software offered by service provider.