Gates sees mobile phones overtaking iPods

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Microsoft founder Bill Gates sees mobile phones overtaking MP3s as the top choice of portable music player, and views the raging popularity of Apple's iPod player as unsustainable, he told a German newspaper. "As good as Apple may be, I don't believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run," he said in an interview published in Thursday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

"You can make parallels with computers: Apple was very strong in this field before, with its Macintosh and its graphics user interface -- like the iPod today -- and then lost its position," Gates said. Apple has around two thirds of the global market for MP3 music players, which store thousands of songs on pocket-sized disk drives or smaller flash memory chips, and sold more than 5 million iPods in the last quarter.