After reading this piece I realized that Stuart Dredge and I have a lot in common. I am currently in possession of two mobile devices, the Helio Fin (I love it) and the Moto Q (I love the QWERTY keypad), both of which play music and movies, with expansions the Fin can hold a little over 4GB and the Q can hold around 2GB of music, but yet whenever I leave home, I still take my Zune (don’t ever buy one kids, get an iPod, trust me).
Why, because I love music, so much so that my music collection has grown to enormous proportions and because I rarely play the same stuff more than once. I don’t want to have to sync my MP3 player and think about what I want to hear before I even leave, I want to have it all. So other than storage problems, Mr. Dredge sites battery life as another issue affecting the buying trends of true audio fiends.
It really is an issue, the Q’s battery life is decent, and I haven’t even tried playing music or movies on it, but the Fin, well if I play music or videos on it, I can pretty much kiss a full charge away in 8-10 hours which, if that were my only means of communication, would really suck. However if I don’t use the Fin for anything but phone calls, maybe checking email or the occasional photo, it lasts for a few days usually. At the same time though, my Zune will die after about 8-9 hours of just music playing, and that’s with the wifi off.
In summary, if phone makers truly want their handsets to become the all-in-one devices of the future, they are going to have to work on more storage space and longer batteries. Really there isn’t much else that needs added, several already have touch screens and/or QWERTY keypads, GPS, WiFi, and the Cameras on cell phones are growing at amazing rates as far as what they can do and how good of pictures they can take, so storage and battery life are pretty much it, everything else seems to be moving along at a good pace on its own.
Don't forget to check out our live-blog coverage of the big Apple Event tomorrow at 10AM to see how much closer the iPod can get to a cell phone, hopefully.
Opinion: Why music geeks won't replace their iPod with a mobile phone just yet [via techdigest]
