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To: Win-Lose-Draw who wrote (44683)	5/14/2005 9:51:42 AM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 213177

Totally. It's not hard to do - 95% of the planet uses either WMP or iTunes, both well-understood apps - but for some baffling reason everybody (so far) has tried to differentiate themselves on the software sync side of things. Dumb, dumb, dumb. iTunes (and to a lesser extent WMP) are to MP3s what Word and Excel are to documents and spreadsheets: if you ignore them, you die. I dont think that I understand this issue very well....would Apple allow a competitor to synch their MP3 player with iTunes? Does a competitor need their permission? In any case, the integration with WMP is coming....at least for Nokia. They announced a partnership with Microsoft and Loudeye in February. press.nokia.com There current handsets use something called "Nokia Audio Manager" which seems pretty clunky. The Nokia N91 will use the WMP....I'm not sure about the rest of the MP3 enabled handsets that Nokia will be introducing through the year, but I would assume that WMP support will eventually become standard. We'll have to wait and see how well they have managed to integrate the platforms but it definitely seems like a step in the right direction for Nokia. Something else to watch is to see what Sony Ericsson is doing. Their Walkman handset is getting quite a bit of buzz, but Sony has never been known for great software/hardware integration. At a minimum, the handset manufacturers are beginning to close the gap but the question is....will it take 2 or 3 generations of music enabled handsets for them to get these issues right? Slacker