I-pod phone vs Motorola I-tunes? No thanks says Vivendi Universal….<< M&A Fever: who's next? | Main | Turn the teen into a lifelong customer >> Thomas Husson | September 15, 2005, 02:16 AM Is the hype over? Not sure, more than a week after the commercial availability of the ROKR phone (btw, more than a year after the official announcement), I received a couple of journalist calls to discuss the issue and it was raised by a financial analyst at Vivendi Universal first half results, which I attended yesterday. Surprisingly, the answer from SFR, was that this phone was not convenient to listen music because you have to download the music from your PC and then transfer it to your phone. Indeed, with the i-tunes software embedded in the “rocker” you can only playback music and cannot download music over the air. Not convenient? Well it is convenient! That’s precisely what you do with the i-pod and the i-pod is a mobile device. Ok, you will not be able to make impulse purchases, but is that a big deal? For the mobile operator yes since revenues will not come from data used on 3G networks, but for the consumer? SFR is investing heavily on mobile music and I do understand their point of view. However, you will not prevent people to transfer files. It seems to be the view of T-Mobile and 02, who will launch the phone in the next few months, as well as French operator Bouygues Telecom. And they too invest in mobile music! So who is right? It was argued that the Motorola ROKR was postponed due to lack of interest from mobile ops. Not so sure in the end, since it is only…a phone. You just need some buzz and marketing to attract new customers into buying the phone and subscribing your offer. Apple is quite good at that and that is probably the main point of the story since there are already many Mp3 phones in the market and that Sony Walkman W800, forthcoming Nokia N91 and other Samsung to be introduced will probably not generate the same buzz. Another interesting point was pointed out by my colleague Michael Gartenberg (VP of Jupiter research) in a recent post: “The importance of today’s ROKR announcement isn’t really this particular phone (...) rather it is the first time we have Apple’s iTunes (and FairPlay DRM) on a non-Apple device and Apple’s integration of this technology on a cell phone (...) if Apple thought that cell phones were iPod killers, would they have licensed their stuff to Motorola?” To come back to Vivendi Universal, here is the full press-release Key takeaways are: - 300.000 3G subscribers at the end of August (1.8% of the installed base) |
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