Wireless

Wireless

by Mike Masnick





Transferring Content To Your Mobile Phone

Lots of people have been saying this over and over again, but carriers and those selling content for mobile phones have been in denial. It's going to get increasingly easy to get content on mobile phones for free. Now, a company named TDK has launched a system for transferring content from your PC to your mobile phone using Bluetooth. They say it will let users get around the walled garden aspects of carriers who are trying to protect the content on the phone - though, I imagine it really depends on the phone that you have, and whether or not there's specific content made for that phone. Now, the question is whether or not the wireless carriers will make the mistake of trying to further lockdown their phones to prevent people from using tools like this. It's entirely possible that they'll try to add some technology (which will be quickly broken) to say that only legitimate or "signed" content can work on the phone. Of course, any carrier who does this will be sacrificing long term opportunity for a short-term grab at profits. A carrier who does this will simply be pushing customers away to competitors who feel it's better to let customers do what they want with the phone they bought. Derek adds: In the future, look for phones that can be locked into carrier content to have bigger subsidies, and for phones with Bluetooth, flash memory slots, and sync cables (which all go over the fence of the walled garden) to be less subsidized, more expensive handsets.

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