In an interview with the Financial Times, a Nokia executive predicts mobile phones will kill markets for portable music players and portable video cameras.
In interview published in today’s edition of the Financial Times (signup required), Anssi Vanjoki, the head of Nokia‘s multimedia unit, predicted the mobile phone will kill markets for standalone media devices such as music players and video camcorders.
Vanjoki pointed out that in 2000, Nokia predicted the traditional photo industry was on its last legs, and, sure enough, Konica Minolta has shut down its camera business, and Agfa-Gevaert sold its photography unit in 2004. The article quotes Vanjoki as saying “In the next 6-12 months, there will be more of these announcements. The next to disappear will be the makers of music devices and then the manufacturers of video cameras.”
Nokia is the world’s largest maker of mobile handsets, having made some 100 million handsets last year, some 40 million of them with built-in music capability.
To date, phone handsets have made little dent in the market for MP3 players, with recent studies finding consumers prefer the control and quality of dedicated music players to the music capabilities often hastily added on to phones. But as mobile phones pay increasing attention to the design of their music features, become capable of storing significant amounts of music, and integrate with user’s digital music collections and over-the-air online music stores, the popularity of music phones is expected to soar. And, as ever, industry rumors have the engineers in Cupertino feverishly working on an Apple-branded iPod music phone.
Similarly, video recording capabilities have been the province of high-end smart phones, but as memory capacities increase and component prices decline, video-recording capabilities are increasingly becoming available in mid-range handsets.
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RSSHowever, when was that last time you were satisfied using your cell phone to shoot your family photos, or your digital video footage, or download and sync your music and playback? Furthermore, are you willing to drain your cell phone battery to listen to music only to have the battery die when you need to make (or receive) a call?
I have an idea for the cell phone companies and carriers...How about make a phone that can actually make and receive a quality phone call? Now that would be some real innovation.
Music playback is just an extra feature of a mobile phone, neither sound quality nor functionality can be compared with a dedicated music player. What matters is the quality of digital to analog conversion and amplification. Both are still very low with mobiles, not to mention you have to use dedicated headphones that are miles behind current standard set by Sennheiser or Beyerdynamic headphones. Take any iRiver or Creative player and play the same song using the same headphones, then compare it with playback thru mobile phone. There is audible difference. I compared it on Zen Micro and my SE k300i phone with Sennheiser headphones.