Breed your cell phone with an Ipod

"AT&T Wireless to Offer New mMode Service
AT&T Wireless is getting ready to offer a new mobile music service that will allow its mMode subscribers to purchase music downloads on their wireless phones. The offering will be available sometime in 2004 and AT&T is among one of the first U.S.-based wireless service providers to offer a service of this kind. The service will allow these customers to browse songs and preview selections before purchasing. The added charge for the service would appear on each users' monthly cell phone bill. (Source: Seattle Times, WA)" Yes, this is not particularily new, and has been a sources of news in Europe for ages. But it IS interesting in the context of the United States, the DMCA laws, the struggle of the record industry to retain the tenuous hold on its monopoly.

It also points to something else:
Phones fundamentally are social tools. This is on of those technologies that is used to help us maintain our social ties (keep in touch that is). Yet cell phone manufacturers for some reason have decided that talking (and maybe SMS) were everything the user needed to use the phone for "social" things. They have, instead, focused on adding a myriad of features that have LITTLE TO DO with the social aspect of the phone. In fact, some might even argue these features make the phone ANTI-Social. Users, of course, find ways to use these features for social reasons, or ignore their presence past the buying-feature-bloat-craze. For example, when was the last time you used the calendar or task list on your phone? (mine is a motorola and the calendar is the most awkward thing I've seen, after the operating system as a whole, but that's a different issue). What puzzles me most, is the strange insistence of the phone-maker companies to NOT investigate new ideas in the social-network space. A space, where their product is, essentially, the most important. (Some of HomeNet's research repeatedly shows that phones are more important than even face-to-face meetings for keep up social ties and feelings of closeness)

I wonder what new uses phone-users will invent for the music-touting, juke-box-like new At&T phone...