Everyone pretty much agrees that mobile music is an interesting experience for the discerning consumer. Its been covered pretty well in the blogosphere, and if there’s any doubt, just look at the 42 million iPods sold to date. However, there a couple of aspects of mobile music that I feel doesn’t get enough focus.

Device Convergence
I can’t believe there’re still pundits advocating that for a truly great mobile music device, it needs to be dedicated solely to music. I have an mp3 player (and a digital camera, for that matter), but I loathe carrying them around. It seems like a no brainer to build a device which offers adequate functionality around the holy grail of audio, video and communication. Even Apple, with their fanatic loyalty to the user experience, has finally realized this simply isn’t the case - the iPod Video has made its debut and the iPhone is imminent.

Unfortunately, a decent convergence device is still years away in my opinion. Yes, even the much vaunted iPhone sounds like it will fail to deliver. Kevin Rose leaked that in order to solve the battery problem, the iPhone will contain two batteries - one for the phone and the other dedicated to the mp3 player. This just smacks of one of my early science fair projects. In an attempt to invent something new, I taped together a spoon and a fork, pointing in opposite directions, and called it a spork (I hadn’t discovered Taco Bell yet). C’mon Jobs, any elementary school kid could tape together a cell phone and an iPod and call it a day. Where’s the true innovation here?

Passive Consumption
For some inexplicable reason, it seems like mobile operators are all jumping on the video bandwagon. First there was VCast, followed quickly by Cingular Video. Everywhere you look, there are startups like MobiTV and GoTV, looking for a slice of the action. When did mobile music start to take a back seat to video?

In my mind, listening to music is simply a better fit for a mobile scenario. Video is great for when you’re sitting down for an extended periods of time and can spare the focus. But how often do you really find yourself in this kind of situation? Consider you’re daily commute. You either drive, which should take up your attention if you’re even remotely responsible, or you take the public transit. The latter does provide some time to consume video while sitting at the stop or on the subway/train/bus, but I’d argue that you’re probably also required to do some walking from stop to stop, which again requires your attention.

In every case outlined above, you could be listening to music without losing focus. The commute was just one example. What about when you’re working, studying, shopping or exercising? Music is equally applicable to all of those scenarios, whereas video would be appropriate for none.

The point is, the wireless industry needs to stop buying into the YouTube hype/hysteria and concentrate on building services that consumers would actually uinse.

Next post: The Case against Mobile Music