The road of multipurpose phones hasn't been popular with many American wireless carriers and its doubtful iTunes on Motorolas has done a good job due to 50(Euro)/100(Americas) song limit. Other carriers usually cripple their phones outright for example Verizon Wireless crippled bluetooth file exchange ability & restricted data port.
Sony Ericsson's Rise To Fame
Before the world saw the ROKR, Sony Ericsson took the risk with their K750/W800 by including a decent music player and using Memory Stick Duo for larger capacity. S710a sold by Cingular used the old Memory Stick, the phone was pricey, weight/size made many people lose interest outright and 128mb max card limit became a deal breaker. Still the S710a remains popular with Cingular fans due to the better 1.3mp camera sensor... W600 couldn't match the level of clarity and suffered what is known as the WSOD-White Screen Of Death.
With SE's nice & snappy UI, its sad to say it these days of Nokia's reworked S40 platform is showing its age and feels slower with each revision. If anything most people are starting to lean more towards SE & Motorola.
Motorola's ROKR, SLVR & RAZR V3i: iTunes!
Exclusive deals such as Motorola+iTunes+Cingular has its pros and cons. Cingular has more of a solid national footprint in the US, its been said their customer base is on par with T-Mobile in terms of average age group and international traveling... it makes sense why Apple & Motorola had gone towards Cingular. Downside with this kind of deal, if you're on another carrier or regional one it'll be when hell freezes over or you find someone reselling their unlocked ROKR/SLVR/V3i. Considering people have had awful experiences with Cingular, they're less likely to forgive and forget... also with the rebranding to "at&t" will cause additional bitterness to surface. As a customer, I've never had problems with Cingular and they're still a better option for those who dislike other carriers for whatever reason. Personally I prefer never having all my services with one company, I still use T-Mobile for text/mms messaging since they're cheaper :-)
Nokia: Where Are You?
The steady decline of mid-end Nokias for the Americas isn't a good sign. Maybe its from carriers running out of room or pricing deals are the reason. There are rumours of Cingular scrapping the Nokia 6126 before its release and with the 6682 discontinued... hello low-end 6030 & 6102i. Also while Cingular does have the 9300 online/premier(B2B), as far as corp and dealer stores I've been to it seems to be an online exclusive.
(Update: Nokia 6125 was scrapped for hardware issues)
I Feel The Pain Of CDMA-ers: LG vs Sanyo vs Samsung
Theres one thing Sprint/Verizon Wireless has against them in terms of expanding choice, a lack of using a SIM card results in being almost the last for anything and the inability to use imported phones(to avoid being in an endless 1-2yr contract loop). With the direction of crippled bluetooth/data port, you may as well buy the cheapest piece of junk and invest in a music player. Never been a fan of Verizon trying to find new ways to charge customers for even the most basic ability of transfering contacts to a new phone... at least Sprint corp stores will do this for FREE!
Currently a plus for Verizon at the moment is the RAZR V3m, LG Chocolate and Samsung A930 that have a memory slot with music abilities. Sprint customers on the other hand seem to suffer the pains of great lineups then lousy ones. At the moment their Samsung A900 is the better feature & value packed phone, can't say much of the LG Fusic as it looks childish. For some people the easy answer is blame it on Sprint spending so much to aquire Nextel and they're busy trying to release a hybrid iDen+CDMA phone. Whenever that migration happens, hopefully it'll bring better choice and reasonable pricing.
Maybe I'm bias since my family had used Sprint before, they're still a better option than Verizon Wireless if you can't stand "Get it Now" crap.
Music Player or Music Phone?
At the moment a music player has the best value for storage space, less problem prone and if you lose a cheap player it won't be a huge deal. Also due to the nature of GSM in the Americas which lacks IMEI blacklisting, you can't get insurance on certain phones(iTunes & Smartphones).
Since the better music phones are on the GSM side of wireless, in the US we're stuck with two nationwide carriers(Cingular & T-Mobile) and a handful of regional carriers(ex: Dobson, Suncom, etc)... not exactly a level playing field. T-Mobile in my experience has the best customer service, tech support and corp store reps... Cingular is nearly the opposite and sadly their store reps know more about the company policy than customer service ex- a CSR told a parent insurance can remain on an account with a Motorola SLVR when their own customer support site says otherwise and corp+dealer reps say the same. If a customer knows(needs to know) a company's policy better than them, there isn't much "Raising The Bar" going on for a customer to do their job for them!
Until then I'll keep my Apple iPod for music, Cingular for voice and T-Mobile for text, MMS & internet.