Cellphone will beat iPod

CNN reported Microsoft founder Bill Gates sees mobile phones overtaking MP3s as the top choice of portable music players, and views the raging popularity of Apple's iPod player as unsustainable, he told a German newspaper. "As good as Apple may be, I don't believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run," he said in an interview published in Thursday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "You can make parallels with computers: Apple was very strong in this field before, with its Macintosh and its graphics user interface -- like the iPod today -- and then lost its position," Gates said. Apple (Research) has around two thirds of the global market for MP3 music players, which store thousands of songs on pocket-sized disk drives or smaller flash memory chips, and sold more than 5 million iPods in the last quarter. But it faces increasing competition not only from the likes of Sony, whose iconic Walkman dominated the personal audio market for two decades, but also from mobile-phone companies integrating MP3 players into handsets.

This is very funny. This may just be a case of some people loving Microsoft and others hating them, and fearing Microsoft is trying to take over the world, but Memorandum showed two bloggers commenting on this item, one from the left, and one from the right.

Left wingKos @DailyKos blogged When I was in London, the Guardian gave me a cell phone to use in country. I was shocked that the Motorola phone, otherwise a nice piece of equipment, sported a Microsoft interface.

The Guardian helpfully preloaded every number I might ever need -- cell and office numbers of my editors, the paper's front desk, etc. Within six hours, the Microsoft phone OS had eaten the numbers. But wait! I thought, the "call history" section would include all the numbers I've called and received, so at least I could go there to get the most important numbers. But after a day, the Microsoft phone OS had eaten those.

So I laughed when I read this. That Windows Mobile smartphone sucks horribly. Stay away from it at all costs.

Meanwhile, my old trusty Powerbook finally bought it. Yup, the one that made the cover of several publications and was prominently featured in my C-SPAN interview had to be retired. I abused that machine like nothing else, and when the monitor hinge finally gave, I had to sadly upgrade. (And I really mean 'sadly'. I was hoping to hold out until next year when the G5 powerbooks finally make an appearance.)

While I haven't run OS X Tiger through its paces, it had one incredible feature -- I could connect it to my old laptop, and it literally transferred everything over seamlessly to my new one. Everything, from programs, to my emails, to bookmarks, to cookies. And it transferred about 40 GBs of stuff in less than an hour. As anyone who has had to upgrade their machine knows, this is nothing short of miraculous.

Finally, I love to keep track of Firefox's growth versus the decrepit Internet Explorer. And while browser stats jump around quite a bit, IE is generally being held under 50 percent at this site. Safari usually hovers in the 15 percent, with Firefox in the 30-40 percent range.

Right wingGlenn Reynolds blogged Bill Gates says that cellphones will kill the iPod. That's funny, because at BlogNashville Dan Gillmor was showing me his cellphone / MP3 player and saying that he didn't listen to his iPod anymore.

I don't have a cell phone OR an iPod, so I really can't say which is better.