February 17, 2005
The Music Phone Is Already Here, Sendo Says
As three of the world's top six mobile phone makers announced music-playing phones at this week's 3GSM wireless trade show, Britain's privately held Sendo said it was the only handset maker that could already show a model, reports Reuters.
"Sendo's X2 smartphone with a built-in music player that can deal with almost all digital music encoding formats, will be available in April at 99 pounds ($187) for pre-paid subscribers, said Hugh Brogan, the chief executive of the Birmingham-based company.
Nokia and Sony Ericsson joined Motorola this week in announcing they would tap the online music revolution with phones that could play several digital music formats. No designs were unveiled, however.
So far, Motorola is the only handset vendor to announce it will have an iTunes player for its future music phone, dubbed ROKR. Nokia would support Windows Audio as well as open standards, and Sony Ericsson would support only open standards.
The handset has been designed to offer music quality similar or better than portable digital music players and has dedicated buttons to play, pause, stop and skip tracks."
Related article on Sendo's X2 smartphone, "the first phone that makes playing music truly as simple as making a call".
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