"... and the PC is a peripheral." Is it visible now? I thought I saw it this morning, but turns out I just hadn't had enought coffee. I simply love statements like this, (made at CES by Motorola EVP Ron Garriques regarding the iPod compatible phone) as it reminds me of my "old days" at WIRED, when people would say stuff like this in the course of normal conversation - no kidding.

Ultimately, though, it is a big move forward, although once again, Apple (and companies closely associated with Apple) just love to announce 2nd and 3rd generation innovations as if they were first. Now that apple is moving out of the closed iPod/iTunes system, I think that the closed nature of that system may start to hurt them (hmm... familiar scenario for them?).

I recently bought my fiance the Zen Micro, and we love it. One interesting feature is that the middleware you use to transfer files is essentially just an IE browser. It doesn't hijack my mime types, it doesn't require that I build a "libarary" that I have already painstakingly done in my file system, and it doesn't encourage or require me to change my preferred media player or ripper. I can just as easily transfer files to my 1Gig SD card that I use to listen to music on my Treo. I find that the SD Card transfer is really easy and convenient, and even if I HAD a really fast wireless network, I would probably still use my PC, because it will probably always have a faster connection, and dropping an SD card in and out of the devices will be easier than sync'ing or transfering for probably quite sometime (anyone who has a phone that syncs to PC data knows the inherent config problems).

All in all, the Motorola move is a good one, but I think that they are going to open themselves up to other companies with more open architectures to offer simpler solutions.