iTunes and the Nokia N91
There’s a rumor going around that Apple and Nokia are going to partner and produce a mobile iTunes application for the Nokia N91. Nokia is denying it, but the phone’s still months away from its launch, so there’s plenty of time for things to change.
As I see it, there are sort of three levels of iTunes integration for portable devices:
- The device syncs with iTunes and can play encrypted iTunes Music Store
.m4p
files. Right now, this is pretty much just the iPod, although the long-rumored Motorola iTunes phone will join it once it’s released. - The device syncs with iTunes and can play MP3s and maybe unencrypted AAC files. Before the iPod took off, most MP3 players fit into this category, but I don’t know if Apple has continued supporting their competition.
- The device and iTunes don’t know anything about each other, and the user is stuck looking for third-party tools.
I suspect that the N91 will fit into the second category–just plug it into your computer using a USB cable and iTunes will copy things over. It’s possible that we’ll need a bit of glue code, but that shouldn’t be too hard to write. Worst case, it should only take a few hours to write something that can read through iTune’s XML database and copy playlists to the N91.