With the glaring, bright, intense exception of the iPhone, music phones have more or less been a failure. Many have tried, many have failed. In fact, it could be argued that the only reason the iPhone gets any iPod attention was because people already had iPods, ya know? But that’s a different story altogether.
According to the esteemed Om Malik, that’s still the case. Om got his elegant hands on a pre-release version of the sexy Nokia N81, one of the most anticipated phones coming out in the next few months. Nokia’s packed a respectable 8GB of memory into the phone, and gives it easy-to-access music controls.
But it sucks. According to Om, the S60 Symbian OS hasn’t been improved much, if at all. The interface is janky, and not just on the handset: the companion desktop app didn’t want to behave at all. Once he got the music on, sure, it sounded fine, but we’re used to iPhone, we’re used to Zune, we’re used to slick, fast interfaces, and this phone didn’t have it.
I could stomp all over it even more, but I don’t want to re-invent Om’s wheel.