V Cast, Verizon's new song download service, which will launch Jan. 16, is built around Microsoft's digital media technology and thus, as Brad Hill suspected, Verizon has decided to kill its phones' ability to play MP3 files. The rationale, according to a spokesman, is simplicity.

"We don't view this as restricting functionality," said Jesse Money, Verizon's director of consumer multimedia services told CNET. "We wanted one music player on the phone with a simple and consistent look and feel throughout the player. If we were to leave (the MP3 support intact), then there would be two players with different experiences."

Translation: It's real simple. If you want to play music on your phone, you have to buy it from us.

The V Cast service will initially be available on the LG VX8100 and the Samsung a950. Samsung promptly changed its a950 billing as the phone that can "play MP3 masterpieces" to one that simply plays "musical masterpieces." See? The beauty of simplification.

But that doesn't mean that users would be forced to buy Windows versions of songs they already own in MP3 form.

Microsoft's Windows Media 10 software automatically makes copies of MP3 songs on your hard drive and loads them onto the phone in the correct Microsoft-based format, leaving the original unchanged.

But that software is only available for PCs today, leaving customers with Apple Macintosh or Linux-based computers out of luck, unless they find a different way of translating their MP3 songs into Microsoft's format.