We've all known for a while that Symbian devices are pretty good platforms for playing back music. In theory, anyway, as Nokia has traditionally insisted (why, oh why?) on crippling most of its Series 60 smartphones to only output in mono. Who on earth wants to listen to their favourite music in mono? You might as well listen with only one ear... Hopefully, Nokia are starting to see the light, with their recent new Communicators, with the 7710 and even with the latest Series 60 devices all supporting stereo music output.
There I was, drinking with an interested friend, when I found myself enthusing about the joys of keeping all my favourite music on my smartphone. I plonked my Sendo X down on the table in front of him. "That smartphone has got my entire CD collection on it", I boasted." "It's always with me and I can use it to drive a Hi-Fi, a set of speakers or my car stereo system. All my music, all the time. Oh yes, and it's a phone and personal computer as well. And you can get one for next to nothing..."
Admittedly I was stretching the truth slightly, in that it hadn't got all my CDs loaded. But it did have my favourite 40 or so albums, at full CD quality, on its 1GB SD card. For those of you that are good at maths, you'll be scratching your head until you remember that I'm a bit of an Ogg Vorbis fan; you know, the open source music format that's twice as efficient as MP3...? Go grab OggPlay for yourself and have a play... Anyway, back to the main plot...
My friend's jaw dropped. (It dropped even more when I slammed in the Route 66 MMC card and showed the X describing how I should get home again, but that's another story).
A couple of hours later, I was idly listening to our very own Ewan being interviewed by the PodCast people, in which he was favourably comparing Symbian smartphones to the big selling iPod players, and pointing out that there had been a lot more smartphones sold than iPods. Yet the media at large portray an iPod as more or less the only digital music player out there. And they talk about MP3 as if it's the only digital music format. And they usually totally ignore the fact that 20 million Symbian smartphones can (to some extent or other) also fill your ears with digital music.
As ever, getting the message out that there's more to music than iPods or MP3 is a matter of education and I doubt it'll happen overnight. But sooner or later, the iPod (and all other simple music players like it) will die. Devices are becoming increasingly converged, as I'm sure you've noticed. PDAs are acquiring telephony and being branded as smartphones. Traditional phones are acquiring cameras, games and basic PIM functionality. Standalone entertainment devices (like the iPod, Portable Media Centers, etc.) are acquiring PIM functions and better connectivity. But right, slap bang in the middle, are Symbian OS-powered smartphones. Never have Symbian been better placed to succeed. For you and I, this means that we're also in the right place, investing our time and energy in learning about a platform that's very much in the ascendancy.
Of course, no company stands still in this business, and Apple (for one) have some pretty cool ideas. I'm sure they'll come up with ways to make 'dumb' music players like the iPod more intelligent and adaptable. But there's no way the existing breed can cope with the vision of a connected smartphone that can handle all your email, stereo music (including buying direct to the phone, thanks to 3G speeds), PIM, Office, imaging and gaming needs, all in the one tiny box.
Anyone who's handled a device like the Sendo X gets smitten by the same thought - this is what a smartphone should look like. Let's fast forward to a similar looking 'everyone has one' smartphone in the year 2008. The processor will be ten times as fast (making, among other things, dictation quite practical as a means of text input), the memory card will hold even the largest music (and video) collection in full, and the 4G connectivity will mean that music albums and movies will take only a couple of minutes to download.
And it will look like the Sendo X. Not a Pocket PC. Or an iPod.
Steve Litchfield, March 2005