There is rampant speculation continuing on Digg.com about Apple Inc offering a cellular phone. It seems a logical step for an emerging media company – the computer business is getting saturated and has been difficult for some time, making them think to go into iPod mp3 players and the iTunes music offering model.

I spent a few years living in hotels and airports and traveling on planes, trains, and automobiles. This was when the Franklin Planner became too heavy to pack (of course there are the micro sized units) and the mainstream PDA revolution had started with the Palm handhelds. After ditching the planner for the more portable PDA then the business traveler tools were down to the PDA and cell phone (a laptop can be ported around, but unless you’re stuck for extended work periods the laptop usually goes unused for a day or two trip that I was doing at the time to verify supplier product pre-launch readiness or fix supplier production problems).

To carry a music entertainment medium such as an iPod a traveler has three things (mp3 player, cell phone, and pda). It’s easier to carry two than three so the PDAs have fallen from use (phones picked up their features, but often not as well executed). Recently, phones have been encroaching into the music mp3 market, initially with ring tone downloads. So the next step of being a full player with downloaded music is easy for the phone companies. Apple sees the real threat. A traveler used to carrying two items will seriously think about carrying only one. And so the phone will absorb the music player (look at the size of Apple’s recent Shuffle – there is more in the package to be a housing, clip, jacks, and controls than the actual music and storage business).

The result is Apple makes the connection to sell a phone that happens to provide music services. They provide other downloadable content as well as offer user upload features (for sharing pictures, voice mail, etc from the phone) for that important web community. By designing the phone to be insanely easy and intuitive to use they will breach another market, one with subscriptions and lucrative long distance calling plans. It’s not if but when will Apple release a phone.

And once again the hardware company will expand further into services. Better phone home and tell them Apple is embracing the service economy again..

Cheers!