Captain obvious points out music-phone drawbacks

[Image: big cell phone]Surfing through today’s talked-about news, I ran across a quote from a Bloomberg.com article that seems to be to be perfectly obvious. Does it really taken an analyst and a research study to make this call:

A JupiterResearch study last month showed cellular phones with the ability to play digital music aren’t generating a lot of usage because few customers are interested in downloading music over the air and the phones don’t let users load existing digital music collections, according to analyst David Card.

Duh. Guess what? My T-Mobile SDA lets me load my mp3s onto it, so all I had to do was burn CDs of my iTunes store music and re-rip them, then dump them onto my phone with 1gb of memory. Now I don’t have to carry my iPod everywhere, especially if it’s only a short trip.

I really wonder what would happen if some small manufacturer made a high-quality device that was an unlocked cell phone, decent digital camera, and an mp3 player. We’re in the age of consumer-power now, and companies need to stop trying to lock people in to their traps.