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Forgive me if I’m a little behind, but I’m not used to receiving two Pandora announcements in one week. In addition to beefing up their online web services, Pandora has announced a partnership with AT&T to stream personalized music selections to handsets. AT&T customers will need a supported phone, a data and to pony up $8.99/month… which makes Sprint’s $2.99/mo Pandora offering look like a bargain. It’s great to see online services expand beyond the browser, but is AT&T setting themselves up for failure?
The initial handset lineup: Samsung SYNC, a717 and a737, the Motorola V3xx and RAZR 2, LG trax and LG CU400 and CU405 models.
In other Pandora news, or non-news as the case may be, I’ve gotten nothing after quizzing Dell (at DigitalLife), Pandora founder Tim Westergren, and a Pandora employee/ZNF reader on their portable audio player (originally?) based on the Zing platform. Dell wouldn’t even comment on how they intend to use Zing… Each time they got their feet wet, they gave up on consumer electronics (branded PDAs, portable multimedia devices, and HDTVs) - so I don’t have a good feeling about the acquisition.
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- Fondled @gartenberg's Sony Xperia X1 and @mattbuchanan's Blackberry Storm handsets tonight. Like *hardware* on both, software has issues...
- Heading to PEPCOM press event in NYC now. Look for me on QIK in an hour or so for live video. qik.com/davezatz
- @TylerPruitt Good luck with that... Satellite radio will live on, but your stock may not survive bankruptcy or liquidation. Remember WCOM.
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4 Responses for "Pandora Lands on AT&T Handsets"
“is AT&T setting themselves up for failure?”
They’re setting the Pandora service up for failure at least. AT&T seems to think improving their mobile service equals over-monitizing everything.
I wondered about my word choices there…
I assume these Java clients are pretty far along in development (given the numerous Sprint handsets) and require simple tweaking for compatibility. So the cost/risk for both companies is probably small. (Much smaller for AT&T obviously.) But I doubt they’ll wind up with many joint customers at that price. I’d prefer Pandora release these clients “off-deck” for a fee ($19.99?) and let me handle the data connectivity issues with my carrier. It’s always a tough call in this decision - pros and cons to off-deck versus on: Complexity for consumers, potential audience size, revenue models, carrier support, etc.
Just a FYI, you don’t have to buy a new handset from the Death Star…err, I mean AT&T to get pandora. You can download it into any unlocked RAZR V3XX:
http://www.pandora.com/on-the-go
If anybody wants it I can send you an URL to the JAR and JAD files and you can side load it locally too.
It’s a shame really. Pandora is great–turned me on to a lot of new music–that I BOUGHT. At $9/mo, I can’t see anybody doing this.
iPhone–AT&T–Pandora– I’m just sayin’
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