Rui CarmoThe hottest news item today was undoubtedly the Apple/Motorola announcement of iTunes support for Motorola phones. As a lot of folk pointed out, this not only makes (legal) music downloads cheaper than some ringtone downloads, but also completely short-circuits mobile operators (who naturally expected to cut themselves in to any sort of "mobilizable" content).
Of course it all happens offline as far as the operators are concerned (stories about "iTunes on demand" are nothing but pie in the sky in this still-mostly-GPRS age where a 3MB file will take hours to download), but the fact that people are going to be carrying around in their phones AAC (and MP3) files that were not downloaded over the air is likely to cause some furore, despite the favorable analyst opinions. That and the DRM mess we'll soon find ourselves into... And we're not in Canada.
But hey, being able to quickly drop a few tracks (although "quickly" is always a relative concept via USB or Bluetooth) into a phone and taking them with me sounds nice, even for people like me who find anything below 100 tracks too repetitive...
I personally would have preferred SonyEricsson over Motorola, if only because all the new SonyEricsson phones tend to have removable storage and the Motorola ones (even the new Star Trekkie-V3) generally suck rocks in user interface terms. But hey, the US is probably their main target right now, and it makes sense in that regard.