David M. Ewalt and Peter Kafka
NEW YORK - For more than a year, Apple and Motorola's plans to release an iTunes-enabled phone have tantalized the music and mobile phone businesses. Now, with the two companies set to unveil the long-rumored handset Sept. 7, they might be underdelivering.
A person who has seen a version of the phone says it was designed to accommodate just 25 songs, which would be "sideloaded" from a user's computer using iTunes. The phone was equipped with a 128-megabyte Sandisk TransFlash memory card -- just one-quarter the capacity of Apple's smallest iPod, the 512-megabyte shuffle, which holds about
120 songs.
While it should be possible to swap out the memory card on the new iTunes phone for one with more capacity, the person who has seen the handset says the phone's software appears to artificially cap song storage at 25 songs, regardless of how much memory the phone has.