Squawk Box August 21

Image representing Pandora (music service) as ...

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

On the SquawkBox conference call this morning we discussed the rumours of an iTunes unlimited offering. The folks over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog published a piece this morning suggesting that Apple might offer (for perhaps $130 year) a subscription “all-you-can-eat” iphone music service, with the option to buy tracks you’d really like to keep. It’s an intriguing idea, especially in the context of the conversation we had yesterday around piracy. At the same time, it seems like there might be some overlap with Satellite Radio, for example.

Consensus on the call: some form of cloud based music subscription / storage makes a ton of sense. Whether it’s Apple’s route, or a service like Pandora, it seems to be the future.

And second, there are a ton of blog postings hitting this morning about Blackberry Bold. The launch is imminent. We’ve got a number of Blackberry users as regulars. So we had a discussion about Citigroup’s report that Bold is strong but not a game changer, the 3G issues being reported and RIM‘s development platforms.

Most tellingly, it was difficult to keep the conversation focused on Blackberry. Our callers are clearly more excited about iPhone.

The most quotable quote of the call came from Bill Volk in relation to Sun Microsystems stewardship of the J2ME platform: “Sun has done the worst possible technical job possible with J2ME”.

On the conference call this morning: Dan Rockwell, Thomas Purves, Dan York, Adam Somer, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, Todd Spraggins, Sheryl Breuker, Frank Abrams.

Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.