Before going too far, I must first admit that I own both a cell phone and an iPod. Neither one is terribly new. The cell phone is about 1 year old and still has a monochrome screen and no camera options. My iPod, dare I say, is a first generation 5GB model. That said, let the war of the future music player begin.

Unless you don’t live, you must have heard by now that Apple teamed up with its former chip producer, Motorola, to develop a cellular phone with the iTunes software installed on it. The phone, cliche-ly called ROKR, will be serviced by Cingular Wireless… remember the last time you had a friend on their network? Ya, neither do I.

Since that announcement by Apple’s Steve Jobs, speculations started flying that Apple will develop it’s own “iPhone” rather than rely on the Motorola cell phone. There’s no actual reports, either, as to whether Apple will receive any sort of licensing fee from Motorola or Cingular for use of iTunes. In addition, Jobs and many tech-ologists believe consumers won’t be so apt to order music over their cell plan via download; I can understand, Unicel’smobile internet package is as slow as molasses and if you’re like me, you prefer to manage your songs on your intuitive and much more powerful desktop machine.

So, all this leads me to speculate that the ROKR won’t be so rocking. Sure it may sell hundreds of thousands of models (tough bet), but don’t expect it to get anywhere close to iPod-nic numbers. This little phone and iTunes package can kick some serious butt for awhile, but only until Apple is pleasantly satisfied with it’s “under the covers” iPhone enough to release it to the world. Remember, Apple dominates the personal music device market, and the cell phone has yet to become a real mobile music device.

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Apparantly the RIAA is not slowing down. The unfortunate part, with their pursuit of every P2P network that includes music, is that they will never win. Shut down Kazaa. Shut down Morpheus. More will come and be that much more powerful than their predecessor.

Well, Limewire, among others, are the RIAA’s next target. If you download music illegally, which is to say you don’t purchase the rights, be careful because you might receive unwanted summons mail.

Well Grokster vs MGM has apparently removed the ???if only??? lid from the RIAA. They now are going after LimeWire, Bearshare, MX and their peers (sorry, had to do it) for as they wrote in their cease and desist notice ??? We demand that you immediately cease-and-desist from enabling and inducing the infringement of RIAA member sound recordings ???. Now personally, I think the inducement was to get unknowing users to download spyware so they could profit. But thats me.

What’s this all mean to you?

Besides the fact that thousands of websites were publishing details of Apple’s latest products (iPod nano and iTunes mobile), I think a lot of people knew what Apple was rolling out. The long awaited announcment for a cellular phone with iTunes may have disappointed some, and with others further heightened their allegiance to all things Apple. I, on the other hand, will wait for Cingular to get decent reception in Vermont.

As for the iPod nano, well, what do I do with my current iPod?

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