2005 the year of the MP3 phone?

So 2004 might have been the year that cameraphones finally broke out big time, but Scott Moritz over at TheStreet is predicting that next year will be all about MP3 phones, and we can't say we disagree with him. It's not like everyone,
or even a massive number of people (at least at first), are going to ditch their iPods and listen to music on their cellphones, but even if Apple weren't already working with Motorola to bring iTunes to handsets there'd be a lot to buzz about. The cost of flash memory is going down and mini hard drives are starting to show up in handsets (Samsung already sells a handset with a built-in hard drive in South Korea), and next year several manufacturers are going to introduce musicphones with dedicated player control buttons and significant amounts of built-in storage here in the States (to say nothing of the smartphones and regular cellphones already available now which can play MP3s).

The kicker is that the carriers, which seem to think that musicphones will convince people to sign up for high-speed 3G data services so they can download music directly to their phones,
are racing to build wireless online music stores, but we have this funny feeling that most people will want to do things the old-fashioned way and just transfer songs directly to their phone from a PC over a USB cable.

[Via PicturePhoning]