Mp3 Music Phones

This article is about serious competition to Apple's dominance in the Digital Music market. The information in the article is good news for holiday shoppers. There is now one device to has two distinct uses of Cellphone and Mp3 player. The success of the iPod is huge as outlined in this article as to date more than 60 million iPod's have been sold worldwide. As impressive as this may seem the cellphone market is really in a different league. It is estimated that there is 2 billion cellphone users worldwide and this year alone it's estimated that one billion cellphones will be shipped. There are rumors that Apple may want a piece of the action with the iPod phone.

The article states that Nokia the world's largest handset maker are aiming to sell 80 million music phones by the end of this year. If they succeed they will be the world's largest manufacturer of digital music players. This holiday season there will be a vast array of music phones available. Cingular Wireless are expected to be a major player with 18 models available. Verizon Wireless have just brought out a new phone last week and are heavily marketing one of its best selling music phones the Chocolate.

Promotional rates for the season are likely to only be available to new subscribers with existing users having to pay around $200 for a music phone. Some of the phones on offer will be able to access Apple's iTunes music store featuring 3.5 million tracks. The phone companies also have a growing selection with Sprint having 1 million tracks and Verizon's V Cast Music have 1.5 million songs. Cingular will be offering music from Napster and Yahoo that totals 1.4 million songs. Typically once the track is purchased on the phone it's also available on PC for that one charge. Sprint has sold 8 million songs since November 2005 with each download costing $2.50. Verizon Wireless has two options for purchase either directly from the phone for $1.99 featuring dual delivery for both PC and handset. Consumers can also choose to buy online for 99c and get the track uploaded to their phones for free. All carriers will allow users to use existing music content from their PC. Anyone that wishes to upload iTunes files can either purchase an iTunes phone for motorola or alternatively convert the files using free software available for free download.

The major concept of this technology accordingly to the phone companies is not to replace music players, but to give consumers a different option. Many of these phones have features that iPods don't have the most notable is wireless downloading. It's widely expected that the future for portable music and video lies with cellphones, although there is some way to go yet.