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Ipod Phone Disaster looms closer, with 32 Gigs of flash store in a Sony-Sandisk chip

Last week, Ed Zander proved he shared something with Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, he can screw up the demo of a music-playing cellphone in front of a big audience.

The event occurred at a "Silicon Valley Gathering" according to News.com, which reported: "Zander demonstrated one unnamed prototype device that can receive and play music videos. The device flawlessly played a Gloria Estefan video but would not shut off. Zander tried to silence the wayward device by unsuccessfully attempting to remove the battery. He finally called an offstage assistant for help."

This neatly paralleled Steve Job's foul-up when demonstrating Zander's Rokr phone [left, with Nano].

The ROKR [left] is, said Jobs, basically a Shuffle. It has 100 tunes. They both have "autofill" to add new songs after you select your favourites. They neither have the "wheel" - and that may be where it fails.

Jobs started a playback of a song, and asked a flunky to dial in, to show that the music would auto-mute (it did) and then attempted to show how it auto-resumed. It didn't. "I pressed the wrong button," he admitted.

There's a question you might like to ask before you laugh: why did these two intelligent guys fail?

As yourself: Who would want a 32-Gig mobile phone? It's obvious: anybody who wants to build an iPod phone. That's something everybody seems convinced is going to work, and Ed Zander of Motorola recently said the only real problem was digital rights management.

The question of how much Flash memory Sandisk has build into its Sony-branded Memory Stick Pro Micro chip isn't seen as important. The Register did express some scepticism: "It expects the format to be able to store up to 32GB of data, though it was forced to admit that's a theoretical maximum. Indeed, it has yet to say what capacities the new format will offer when it comes to market sometime during H1 2006," Tony Smith pointed out.

All the reports agree that it won't be 32G next year, but nobody doubts that we'll see it before we lose interest in phones.

So why am I suspicious?

In a nutshell, I don't believe the right question has been asked. It isn't "Can I carry enough songs?" and it isn't "can I justify expensive downloads to keep Vodafone or Orange in business?" It isn't even "Is the iPod just a fad?"

I think it's obvious that phones and music players pass the Kewney Benchmark. The Benchmark, in case you missed it, is easy to apply. You test a great piece of mobile technology by applying the benchmark, thus: "Where is it?"

If the answer isn't "Here!" then it failed the Benchmark. No mobile device which you left in your hotel room, or briefcase, or on your desk, has any interesting technical features at all.

The problem with the iPod phone is the user interface. Trying to design a mobile phone which is also a great music/podcast player is like trying to design a piano which is also a great motorway cruiser. It's like trying to use a steering wheel and accelerator to chop up vegetables for making soup.

The iPod is a great way of searching through a music library for something you want to play. The Nokia is a remarkably efficient way of making phone calls and sending text messages. Everybody is assuming that it's just a matter of time before some genius devises something which will do all that.

Frankly, I don't believe it.

The direction ipods (generic) are going, is as entertainment devices, and information devices.

They are audio, and will become personal digital recorders and playback devices for podcasts, as well as music libraries. They will also become far more intelligent in their indexing, searching, and structuring that stream.

The direction phones are going, is as news-gathering technology, for the common man. They capture voice, pictures, video and location data, and transmit it to associates, friends, family, and friends.

I simply don't believe the two directions can be reconciled. I honestly think that combining the two is as sensible as making a clothes iron which makes great waffles.