(Column) - Things are eerily quiet for MP3 players. Other than Apple’s iPod and Microsoft’s Zune, there’s not much going with portable audio players, and it’s a little awkward. Sure, cell phones, particularly smartphones, have captured away attention from music players, but it’s still a little disappointing to see them go ignored. Just a few years ago, they were the latest rage with video playback capabilities, text and image viewing features and much more. And interestingly enough, Apple is to credit, or blame, for much of these trends.

Soon after iPod took off, everyone was interested in music and portable music players. That’s all the consumer electronics (CE) industry buzzed about, and that’s all that mattered, it seemed. Ever since the launch of the iPhone, all the attention is on the mobile industry with latest features to talk about in cell phones, the latest technologies and their respective price tags. Talk about Apple and its firm grip on the CE industry.

That’s not to say the MP3 player makers are doing poorly. They are doing just fine, but the amount of coverage and the sudden lack of interest in their products must be discouraging. As consumers anticipated the latest in portable audio technology and feature sets a couple of years ago, lately, they are completely ignoring them. Sad!

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Regardless of how well they are doing, they have to be somewhat concerned. With so many mobile devices coming with native audio playback support, it won’t take long before MP3 players go out of fashion, and with the way the mobile industry is evolving, that’s going to happen sooner rather than later.

MP3 players need to evolve and in a big way. We are done with them being a commodity gadget. And it’s up to these companies to make them exciting again. And I hope they are on top of their game before they get crushed from the weighty and impressively powerful mobile industry.

Honestly, the future of MP3 players looks dead, and it’ll be very difficult to revive them. Sure, you’ll always have the iPod and Zune chugging along, but even then, Apple is diversifying and possibly prepping itself for a recession on the music hardware front, and Microsoft, well, Microsoft couldn’t care less about it. The company’s too big to notice a failure in Zune. The question is - what is the rest of the industry going to do to keep consumers coming back for more music players, despite their phones supporting audio playback already?

They need to figure this out and quickly before we finally say our goodbyes to MP3 players and embrace cell phones as are our ultimate entertainment devices.

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