CES 2006: Motorola iRadio service - fluff and hype?
Motorola’s new iRadio service, also announced at CES 2006 (where else?!) sounds intriguing. You use a compatible mobile phone, such as the new Motorola ROKR E2, to store up to 6 radio ‘channels’, which you can then listen to either via a set of headphones, or your car or home stereo. Theoretically, this sounds like a great idea. Using just your mobile phone, you can control your music and pipe it through whichever hi-fi quality technology you happen to be near. Sounds cool, but look beyond the hype, and you find the reality of the service not quite as good as it sounds…
Read more about the Motorola iRadio Service after the jump.
[Source: Motorola, Engadget, Gizmodo]
How the Motorola iRadio Service works
For full use, the Motorola iRadio service requires you to download the iRadio software onto a suitable mobile phone (such as the Motorola ROKR E2), install more software onto your PC, and add a Bluetooth accessory to your car and home stereo. Oh, and just for good measure, you can also use Motorola’s new Bluetooth headphone accessories as well.
According to Motorola’s scenario, you choose 6 iRadio channels from a current list of 435 (featuring genres as diverse as Rock, Jazz, Just Broke Up, and Angry Women…?!). Each channel comprises many tunes specific to the channel’s genre. You can then listen to the tunes as you would normally, through your mobile phone’s headphones.
Where things get interesting is when you come in Bluetooth range of your car stereo or home hi-fi. You can listen to your iRadio on either device, as the iRadio-equipped phone will pipe the music to the stereo using Bluetooth, rather than the your headphones. Cunning!
There’s even a wishlist feature, which lets you bookmark a song for laer recall on your PC by clicking a button on your mobile phone or car stereo.
Looking beyond the hype of the Motorola iRadio Service
Of course, there has to be a downside to all this. To get the music in the first place, you must first go online on your PC, choose the channels you want, and download the music onto your mobile phone, where it’s cached. Only then can you stream your music through your stereo or headphones over Bluetooth. Worse, all the content is DRM-encoded, and the service costs you $7 a month. In other words, it’s no different from any other music download service. In fact, I can already do all this with my MP3 player and an FM-radio adaptor that lets me pipe the MP3 player’s music to any radio. OK so the quality’s not digitally pure, but it only costs £40, and there’s no DRM issues or $7 a month service fee. And Sony Ericsson offer a similar FM gadget for their new Walkman phones, thereby offering an identical service to iRadio, but without the need for costly Bluetooth add-ons.
So an interesting idea, but look closer and it’s simply fluff and hype. Hmmm, not like Motorola to be all fluff and hype!
Technorati Tags: Motorola, iRadio, CES2006, mobile, ROKR
