1/11/2005

Latest must-have in the keitai world: portable music. DoCoMo (and its competitors) are entering the world of digital music player. Their pitch: Why buy an iPod if you can listen your mp3’s through your mobile phone?

Mobile phones with music playing abilities are not really a new thing, and the SH053 from J-Phone was already featuring an mp3 player about 2 years ago (even before they became Vodafone). But the rage now is fueled by the success of the iPod, iPod mini, and all the tiny flash players out there. Hopefully, someone will notice the huge gap of storage capabilities between hard drive and flash players and fix this.

So here comes the Music Porter, from DoCoMo. It looks a bit like a GameBoy Advance SP, comes in 3 colors (black, white, and dark red), features a megapixel digital camera, and has a remote as minimalistic as the Apple iPod one. Of course, if you have nothing else to do, you can also listen to FM radio with it too. Although it is not clear if one can record music from the radio to the MemoryStick Duo card or not.

DoCoMo have hired the J-Pop singer Crystal Kay to do the promo of the Music Porter, and the phone comes pre-loaded with a “Music Porter edition” of her new single “Kiss”.

The TV ads (CM) are even displayed in commute trains, which defeats the purpose of a music player since the sound is switched off… Anyway, she said she’s very happy to finally appear in a commercial, since her songs have been used many times in TV ads but never herself as a person.
Watch the Music Porter CM here.