iPod-like cellphone music still evolving

With more than 8 million sold last year and a popular buzz to die for, Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod has proven there's a big appetite for a portable, battery-powered, Internet-connected digital device that makes sound.

And that's drawing plenty of attention from the businesses behind another kind of portable, battery-powered, Internet-connected digital device that makes sound: cellphone companies.

The save-a-pocket logic of offering consumers iPod-like music capability built into a wireless handset seems obvious. But industry insiders warn that it could be a long wait for true iPod-rivaling devices to hit the market -- unless they come with some clear way for carriers like Cingular Wireless, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint PCS to get a cut of the profits.

Sprint this month began offering a $280 Sanyo MM-5600 camera phone with enough memory to store about one hour's worth of MP3-format music. For another $75, Sprint subscribers can buy a 512-megabyte memory disk for the phone that can store roughly 400 songs, a far cry from the 5,000 that can be stored on the $300 iPod. Sprint customers buying the Sanyo device get a cable to transfer songs from their computer into the phone, which also comes with stereo earphones.

Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications is also rolling out a line of music-playing cellphones this year that sport the Sony Walkman name, which dates back to the original portable music players of the late 1970s.

But a more ambitious effort by phone maker Motorola Inc. has apparently been slowed down. This month, Motorola was set to unveil at a big industry trade show in Hanover, Germany, a phone that downloads music from Apple's iTunes service. Trade reporters had been briefed on the phone's capabilities just days before Motorola canceled the announcement.

The development led to widespread speculation that Motorola had faced pressure from its customers, the wireless carriers, to drop the phone because buyers would be able to bypass the carriers' pricier music-download services. Companies like Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint that are spending billions of dollars on new broadband-speed wireless data networks are looking to song downloads -- along with television and advanced games -- as a key way to pay for their investments.

If people can buy a phone and download music into it straight from their computer song collection, ''that's not an interesting business proposition for the carrier," said John Orlando, marketing vice president with NMS Communications Inc., a Framingham company that sells technology used in cellphone entertainment downloads.

Sprint, for example, is using the Sanyo music phone mainly to promote a $6-a-month streaming music service and its television-on-cellphone services, with the ability to store music offered as an added bonus.

Motorola executives said the only reason for canceling the product launch was a timing dispute between Apple and Motorola. While Motorola is well known for publicizing phones that won't hit the market for months, Motorola mobile phone division president Ron Garriques told reporters at a trade show in New Orleans last week that Apple's ''perspective is that you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday." Motorola said it remains on track to come to market with two phones this year that will download iTunes music.

Philip Redman, a wireless industry analyst with Gartner Inc., said he is skeptical of the conspiracy theories surrounding Motorola's pullback from the iTunes phone launch. ''There's obviously operator interest in that phone," Redman said. ''Motorola doesn't develop those phones without knowing they're going to be able to sell them."

But Adam Benjamin, a semiconductor industry analyst with investment bankers Jefferies & Company Inc. in Boston who follows the iPod market closely, said history suggests that what seems like an obvious iPod-cellphone combination ''is going to take a while to happen. Convergence always takes longer than people think -- always."

Among other issues, Benjamin said, working out how to make sure the music player doesn't rapidly drain the phone battery will be a key challenge.

Sony Ericsson says its W800i will play music and work as a phone for 15 hours before needing to be recharged, which could be a stumbling block for consumers unwilling to have to remember to recharge it every night or every other night.

Orlando also said he's skeptical there's enough overlap between the communities of iPod fans and lovers of souped-up cellphones to make it more than a small niche product. ''We're just beginning to move into the availability of really interesting bandwidth in the wireless world" that makes it feasible for people to load up their phones with songs over the airwaves, Orlando said.

But early experience with networks in Japan and Europe that are a year or more ahead of the United States indicates that ''iPod users and mobile phone users are completely different people. What we see with people who download wireless music is that it's event-driven. It's a song they want right now," Orlando said. ''They'll buy a song for $2 and listen to it for a few days, and then buy a new one. It's not about building a 1,000-song library."

Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.