My bet is that when the music labels allow iTunes to drop DRM, the biggest losers will not be those studios. I doubt their wares will be pirated any more or less. No, the biggest loser will be Apple as suddenly all kinds of other players besides iPods will be usable for the contents of the store. I want to use my phone as my player, but can't yet.
In other brainstorms, Apple is saying the WiFi-enabled iPod Touch could be a whole new computer platform. Well, Nokia has had one for a while, pretty equivalent in many ways, but I think it has been positioned wrong. It shouldn't now be positioned as some kind of media player, no, that space is taken, and certainly the current branding as Your Mobile SSH Solution is, um, limiting. But it would be really useful and notable if it was an adjunct to the phone, a real one, with which I could SMS and MMS and email and browse the phone-book and adjust the settings of the phone it is paired with when in proximity. In fact, when it can see the phone it has been paired with over Bluetooth, the N pads should be the ones that ring when a message has been received, and some trials should be done how headsets and cameras should be distributed across the hardware for video calling or browsing while calling. This way I could have a tiny phone, comparable in size to the 6100 or even the 7380 that I could carry everywhere, even in the shank of my boot, when I am in a state where my outfit uh, has very few pockets, yet when I have jackets and cargo pants I can also carry a messaging and media device that is comfortable and has lots of storage, and these items work together and apart. I kept seeing this weekend people having to make trade-offs between having usable small phones and liking full thumb keyboards or large surfaces to get with their friends and have plenty of music to play. Usually they had committed to some kind of hardware that was ok in some situations, but making other situations difficult.
