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Unless you have been living under a rock since the first iPhone was released in 2007, the mobile phone (with its built-in MP3 music player) has killed the iPod and all other MP3 players in every country around the world. Indeed. With must have electronic devices costing a nifty premium and successive updated new generational models of those devices being introduced each year, it simply doesn’t make any sense for consumers to spend a lot of money on all their wants or got-to-have electronic toys. A reasonable compromise for everyone was to simply get a cool looking mobile phone with a pre-installed MP3 player. It was an ingenious idea that had to start from somewhere with someone or some organization. That someone just happens to be the great inventor Andre Gray. By 1998, Andre Gray was already widely known as the sole inventor Ringtones & Ringbacks. Therefore, if anyone understood the innards of mobile phones and how to create software to instruct the microprocessor to play entire songs or albums, it would be Gray. Being the first person in the world to realize that consumers could not or would not be willing to purchase both a mobile phone and a MP3 player separately, Gray set out to rectify that problem and his finished product he simply named Microgrooves Electronic or Microgrooves-E for short. Microgrooves Electronic, or Microgrooves-E for short, is the world's very first mobile phone music player software capable of storing and playing back pre-recorded music on a cellular phone like a portable digital MP3 player. Microgrooves-E was invented and given its name by prolific inventor Andre Gray who wrote the software using the C programming language for his IBM Simon smartphone that was given to him as a Christmas gift in 1993 by his dear friend Manny Roth, the legendary former operator of the famed Cafe Wha? Club in New York City. Gray worked on Microgrooves-E from April through June of 1998 and introduced it to the public on Thursday, July 16th, 1998 at the Jupiter Communications Plug.In Digital Music Conference during his ten-minute presentation. Microgrooves-E, which was capable of holding up to one hundred songs in the MIDI format only, included four basic features: Artists, Albums, Singles, and Playlists. Microgrooves-E served as the basic template and inspiration, either directly or indirectly, for all future mobile phone music players. Today, every single mobile phone in the world comes with a pre-installed music player. But before a pre-installed MP3 player would become a common feature included on every mobile phone in the world, it would require a cutting edge electronics company with the wherewithal to harness the vision and power of Gray’s vision. Enter Samsung. Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant, released the Samsung SPH-M2100 in August of 1999. It was the first mass produced mobile phone to include an MP3 player. The following year, in 2000, Samsung released the Samsung SPH-M100 (Uproar) as the first cell phone with MP3 player capabilities “in the US market”. The innovative push by Samsung was such that by 2005 more that half of all digital music sold in South Korea was sold directly to mobile phones, which, in turn, inspired all cell phone manufacturers in the world to begin making and selling mobiles phones with pre-installed MP3 players. Sales of these multimedia phones were so brisk that by 2006, mobile phones containing MP3 players were outselling all stand-alone MP3 players combined! In 2007, multimedia cell phones passed the one billion mark, which prompted Apple to publicly state that it was because of these types phones that caused them to develop their iPhone, for they realized that the multimedia cell phone was quickly killing the stand alone MP3 player. To put it into historical perspective: the iPhone is a very innovative and well-made device, but it was only after the fact when Apple witnessed the innovations and great success that Samsung had with their multimedia phone. By: Mika Brenner
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